


Cold Frame

by NamelessDragon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Broken Bones, Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Captain America Sam Wilson, Everyone Needs A Hug, Hurt Loki (Marvel), I mean it's me of course it is, Injury Recovery, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, M/M, Multi, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Loki (Marvel), POV Steve Rogers, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Canon Fix-It, References to Depression, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson Friendship, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Threesome - M/M/M, Touch-Starved, author ignores canon, descriptions of injuries, except Thanos et al
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:20:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NamelessDragon/pseuds/NamelessDragon
Summary: “There’s a body in the garden.”The words were spoken calmly, while Bucky kept his eyes locked onto the gangly form prostrate in the dirt outside. When he’d spotted it in a casual pass of the window, he’d experienced shock for all of half a second before he’d quickly transitioned into acceptance and wariness.He stepped back from the window as Steve rushed up, a damp blue dish towel in his hands. Steve’s eyes immediately narrowed in on the form that was face down by the tomato plants. It was a good sign that Bucky wasn’t hallucinating, and a bad sign in that it meant the corpse in the garden was real.Steve gave Bucky a look, the corners of his mouth sternly downturned.“I didn’t put it there,” Bucky said, just in case that was in question.----------A mostly-dead Loki shows up face-planted in Bucky’s garden one day while Steve’s over for lunch. (ThrowsInfinity War/Endgamedeaths and other parts of canon out the window.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Loki, James "Bucky" Barnes/Loki/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Loki/Steve Rogers
Comments: 270
Kudos: 484





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning that I'm not sure what the eventual posting schedule for this will be, except for the second part, which should be up within a week.
> 
> You can keep an eye on my [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/anamelessdragon) for progress, though.

“There’s a body in the garden.” 

The words were spoken calmly, while Bucky kept his eyes locked onto the gangly form prostrate in the dirt outside. When he’d spotted it in a casual pass of the window, he’d experienced shock for all of half a second before he’d quickly transitioned into acceptance and wariness. 

He stepped back from the window as Steve rushed up, a damp blue dish towel in his hands. Steve’s eyes immediately narrowed in on the form that was face down by the tomato plants. It was a good sign that Bucky wasn’t hallucinating, and a bad sign in that it meant the corpse in the garden was real. 

Steve gave Bucky a look, the corners of his mouth sternly downturned. 

“I didn’t put it there,” Bucky said, just in case that was in question. 

And yeah, maybe there were about forty other more pressing issues with the situation than the idea that someone would try to pin this on him. Like who the person was, or why exactly they died. Or the fact that whatever had done it knew where he lived. From what he was seeing what had been left was in so rough a shape that he doubted any unenhanced human had caused the damage.

Which meant they could still be around, and Bucky just wasn’t seeing them.

“I didn’t think you did,” Steve said, back to staring out the window. 

The words shouldn’t have been a surprise, but Bucky still felt something that had been tense inside of him loosen. He knew that even if Steve had thought Bucky had actually killed the guy, he would have given Bucky a chance to make his case, or else try to deal with the entire thing himself.

Bucky grabbed a gun while Steve picked up his Wakandan arm shields, and they went outside to see their new visitor.

If it was an ambush, it wasn’t immediately apparent. The sun was beaming down full force on the cobblestone path leading to the raised beds Bucky had set up earlier that spring. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in any lines of sight besides of course the body which, annoyingly, was still insisting on being a completely real situation. 

Steve went right up to it. Bucky kept his gun readily raised, and his eyes constantly scanning, his ears peeled for anything signaling an attack. 

Nothing. Bucky turned most of his focus forward with a roiling unease as Steve crouched next to the body.

It was tall, dressed in torn leather, with a shredded green cape hanging by threads from its shoulders. Where the skin wasn’t grey, it was a dozen other shades between black and red, what looked like radiation burns warping it in gruesome patches, and severe bruising stretching down the palm of its left hand. 

Steve carefully put his hands on it, flipping it onto its back, revealing a ghostly grey face and a blackened neck, glassy eyes and a bloodstained face. A man who looked like he could have died from any single one of the visible injuries, but Bucky found himself narrowing in on the neck marks. They looked like they’d been caused by something big.

“It’s Loki,” Steve said, staring down in shock. “Thor’s brother. He told us he died in space.”

Bucky breathed out, looking over their surroundings again. There were still no visible threats, but Bucky liked it even less now that they had an identification of their visitor. It made his arrival seem like even more of a targeted decision.

He exhaled heavily. “So why the hell is his corpse out here smashing my parsley?”

Steve put his fingers to bloated and blackened skin. A look of shock overcame his expression. “He’s not a corpse. He’s alive.”

Bucky tightened his hold on his gun. “What?”

“I’ve got a pulse,” Steve said. 

Well, fuck.

\-----------

They brought him into the house. The exposure to the sun had baked his skin, made the metal on his armor close to searing. Steve seemed to think moving him wouldn’t cause much of a problem making the damage worse, which made Bucky even less happy about what was going to happen if the guy didn’t just kick it and save him the trouble. He didn’t know much about Loki, but what he did know involved him singlehandedly killing dozens of people before attempting a massive invasion of Earth. The first wave, years before Thanos had taken them all out.

But he guessed this was happening. And at least one alien was a lot easier than a whole goddamn army. 

The twenty minutes the doors had been open had let all of the cool air rush out of the house. Steve carried his burden down to the basement while Bucky gave one last check of the yard and the driveway, still expecting someone else to turn up at any moment. Bodies didn’t just end up in people’s yards at random.

But it looked like they were still good for the moment. 

Bucky made his way down to the basement, where Steve had propped Loki up on one of the sturdy superhuman-withstanding exercise benches - which had, like the rest of the house, been a generous donation from the CEO of Stark Industries. Everyone who had taken part in that battle that was still on Earth had ended up a lot more financially comfortable in its aftermath. 

Bucky hadn’t exactly been _mentally_ comfortable with it, considering all that had gone down between him and the CEO’s husband. But there wasn’t a whole lot Bucky was a hundred percent comfortable with these days, and he’d just learned to work around that fact.

Like he was doing now, in this exact situation.

Loki was limp, reddened eyes still half-open with that eerie blank stare. There was no movement, nothing to so much hint at any attempts at respiration. But Steve and then Bucky confirmed that whatever pulse had been felt before was still there, if faint. 

And was it Bucky’s imagination, or were the marks on his neck starting to look...better?

Bucky checked him for weapons while they tried to figure out how to get off the complicated armor. They ended up resorting to cutting free the parts they couldn’t disassemble themselves, and as the leather was pulled free it revealed just how much the armor was working to fill that body out.

This wasn’t a condition someone got into in a single fight, or even over the course of a week. There were signs of extreme and consistent deprivation - the most obvious of which was the emaciation, the bones pressing to skin. The second was the muscle atrophy. There were also more contusions and some wicked-looking scars, but those were superficial by comparison to everything else. 

His left wrist was definitely broken. Bucky probed at it with metal fingers and saw shifting bones under what swelling there was beneath the stretched skin. His neck was in even worse shape, fucked to hell from what was a clearly crushing force, with widespread hematomas reaching down to his sternum. Bucky wished he didn’t have a suspicion of what exactly the type of weapon that injury might have come from. 

He noticed with a start that leaning down like he was meant those dead eyes were locked directly onto him. He quickly pulled his hand away, moving out of range.

Steve performed his own assessment, and looked like he was coming to the same grim conclusions. He made eye contact with Bucky, face set and serious, and Bucky already knew that it was too much to hope for that this would be a situation that had an easy out. Like a simple bullet to the skull. Or just calling someone to take the entire thing off his hands.

He sighed, forehead creasing. “I’ll get the med kits.”

He came back down with a pack of supplies, and either the lighting was playing tricks with his eyes - which he knew had been perfect even before he’d been juiced up by an experimental HYDRA cocktail - or more of the grey was definitely seeping out of Loki’s skin. It looked like he was visibly improving even in the few minutes he’d been inside. 

It was fucking weird. But Bucky wasn’t going to question it right now.

They bandaged and braced him as best they could. He still hadn’t taken any visible breaths, but every time they checked the pulse came back - sluggish, and weak, but there. If he had any kind of organ failure from his condition, it wasn’t taking him out.

They dressed him. He was all but swimming in a pair of Bucky’s black sweat pants, even with the drawstring pulled to its tightest, threatening to slide further down his jutting hipbones. The matching shirt wasn’t much better, the dark color offsetting his sickly pallor with a more dramatic contrast.

Steve briefed Bucky on what he knew about Loki - from the invasion, so Bucky had a better idea of what they’d be dealing with if he’d been at full strength, all the way to his supposed final death. The fact the general story was capped with what amounted to a final “and then he apparently stopped trying to murder everyone and was fine, probably” wasn’t much of a comfort.

Even if it sounded a little familiar.

“Guess you’re staying for dinner,” Bucky said, feeling some of his sour mood ease at Steve’s responding smile.

Steve dipped his head briefly. “I didn’t pack an overnight bag.”

“Tough,” Bucky said, crouching and organizing the supplies back into their places in the med kit. “I already had to surrender some of my clothes to the emaciated alien.”

Steve raised his eyebrows, sliding the last bandage roll within reach with his foot so Bucky could store it. “That sentence would make a lot more sense if you didn’t own about forty pairs of sweat pants.”

Bucky exhaled, wondering at the possessive urge sweeping through him. Yeah, maybe he could have used a shrink or five to help with unraveling some of the crap that was still in his head. But he thought he was doing good. For the most part. It was just that every once in a while there’d be a surprise of a wall that he would come up against when he was dealing with other people.

He didn’t really consider himself materialistic. But apparently the idea of sacrificing his clothes - just the dumb shit that he’d gone and picked out, trying to figure out which exact pair was the comfiest - was a lot more of a problem than his brain could just dump and move on.

It was _Steve,_ though. That made it a lot easier. 

Loki, on the other hand...

“Fine,” he said, getting to his feet with the med kit under his arm. “But you’re washing up again. And you’re taking the first watch.”

“Sounds fair,” Steve said, with a disarming smile, like he wasn’t confused about Bucky’s response. “How ‘bout a couple of shirts?”

“Don’t push it, Rogers.”

\-----------

By the end of the night, everyone in the house was wearing a pair of Bucky’s sweat pants except for Bucky.

He gave Steve another solid pair, carefully avoiding his favorites - like the ones with the embroidered floral print down the sides, or the official Falcon ones he’d found at a yard sale. The second hadn’t actually been on display, he’d just seen one of the seller’s kids wearing them and offered them all the cash he’d had in his wallet. It had been worth it to see the look on Wilson’s face - annoyed at first, and then eventually he’d started constantly asking why Bucky wasn’t wearing them whenever he’d come to visit, no matter what Bucky was currently in the middle of doing.

Bucky didn’t bother getting changed himself. He already knew he wasn’t relaxed enough to get much sleep, even if he was making Steve be the one to stay up to keep an eye on their uninvited guest. And even if that uninvited guest looked like he’d been run over a few times by a tank and then sucked into a quinjet’s engines.

He went outside for some fresh air and checked the perimeter of his property two more times, across the grass and around the clusters of trees including the maple he’d been planning on tapping for the first time that year when winter rolled around. There were no signs that anyone had carried the body in.

He went back to the spot in the garden where they’d found Loki. There wasn’t anything disturbed but the patch of herbs he’d crushed; their fragrance hung heavy on the air. 

As far as Bucky could tell, Loki hadn’t been dumped by anyone. He didn’t have any injuries consistent with damage from a fall. It was like he’d just appeared out of thin air, there on the ground.

Bucky did what he always did when there was a lull in his life and the things around him weren’t making much sense: he wrote in his journal. The tactile nature of it, getting the thoughts in his head down onto paper, helped him wind down after a stressful day. As a bonus, when he woke up he could reread it, just to prove to himself whatever new clusterfuck he went through had actually happened.

Of course, with this particular situation, proving it wasn’t going to be an issue. Unless Loki did him a favor and disappeared into thin air as quickly as he’d come in the first place.

 _Wishful thinking,_ he thought. But he did a lot of wishful thinking, these days. Sometimes he even managed to not feel guilty about it.

This time, he didn’t get the chance for much more of it. 

Steve hadn’t even gone downstairs for the evening when it happened like a train wreck: the first sign of life. Bucky’s instincts felt it ahead of his higher brain functions, a wary terror that sent him shooting to his feet before his ears processed the inhuman howling coming up from beneath the floor. A gasp-wail, haunting and shrill, that sent both him and Steve rushing full speed towards the basement. Bucky didn’t bother to take the steps, just jumped over them to land at the ready at the bottom, with Steve joining him half a second later.

Loki wasn’t on the bench, or anywhere else in the rec room; Bucky could hear him, though - scraping at the floor like a desperate rat through the open bathroom door. The light in there was brighter than the dim bulb that covered the rest of the basement, and the layout of it meant there wouldn’t be many places to hide. Bucky let Steve take point as they approached.

“Loki?”

No answer, but the scrabbling abruptly cut off. Bucky could still hear the breathing, shallow and shredded wheezes coming from around the corner that sent his hackles stiff. Maybe to some people, a sound like that would be unusual, probably even worrying. 

Most of what it told Bucky was that whatever was behind that door was weak, and severely injured, and just begging to be finished off. 

Steve entered carefully, face front to the source of the noise, and some of the defensive set left his shoulders as his eyes grew more distressed. Bucky was only a step behind, so he got his own look soon enough.

The sight was unreal - it looked like Loki had been attempting to wedge his broken body between the sink and the toilet before it had given out. He was writhing on his back, chest heaving in shallow hitches like he was experiencing the throes of compressive asphyxia while simultaneously being strangled. His bloodshot eyes were wide and terrified, shooting to Steve as his teeth bared against his own choking breaths. His coloring had gone from grey to a chalky white, which only emphasized the grotesque tones of the blood pooled beneath his skin.

Steve, of course, moved closer. Bucky tensed hard as a rock but Loki didn’t lash out, just stayed supine as he let out another of those inhuman wheeze-screams. He looked like he was trying to move his limbs but couldn’t, and every time he failed he only grew more frantic, struggled that much more to take in air, and only made it harder for himself to breathe.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Steve said.

 _Speak for yourself,_ Bucky would have thought, if he wasn’t himself feeling taken aback at the fact that this heap of bones and bruises and burns was still anything like functional.

Loki didn’t say anything in response. His eyes were going glazed. Bucky thought of a baby rat he’d found one day in the garden, the dropped meal of a spooked hawk. How it had puffed air out in little labored hitches, before going still.

Loki did the same thing - his panicked breaths eventually ending in him going completely limp. Except he wasn’t dead. 

Bucky’s heart was pounding in the aftermath. “You sure we shouldn’t just put him out of his misery?”

Steve looked at a loss. He carefully crouched down and put his hand to Loki’s neck. “His pulse feels stronger.”

“A lot of things that should be dead can still have a heartbeat,” Bucky said, voice coming out a little harsher than he’d intended. 

Steve gave him a sharp look, and Bucky sighed through his nose as he recognized that stubbornness starting to build up. He’d given his two cents; Steve had denied them. Bucky would act like he was over it, and keep his misgivings to himself. 

“Let’s get him back,” Steve said, reaching over to fix Loki’s clothes - the sweat pants were so loose on him he’d nearly lost them in his escape, hanging low over jutting hip bones.

Bucky took a step closer. “You’re not gonna call anyone?”

Steve shook his head. “I have a feeling none of our doctors are going to be able to help with this. Thor tends to just walk off his injuries - usually whatever science we have can’t keep up with what his body can do on its own.”

Bucky looked at the body on the floor in surprise. “You’re telling me you’re expecting him to just come back from _this_?”

Steve put his arms under Loki, carefully lifting him from the ground. He shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”


	2. Chapter 2

The air was a mountain. It crushed him down and strained his bones.

He could barely move. He could hardly scream.

There were others with him. They were loud. Powerful. They had damaged him while he’d slept. 

They knew his name. He’d forgotten it himself.

He’d forgotten _words._

The air was a mountain. It threatened to crumble him into powder.

So he stopped breathing.

\----------

Sam had been down for a phone date with Bucky in the morning to plan his next visit to his house. Bucky wondered what the hell he was going to tell him as he fried up some eggs and sweet potato hash browns for breakfast.

Turned out he needn’t have worried, as while he was plating the food he got a text from Sam saying that official Captain America business was sidelining him for an extra week. _You’re gonna have to wait on real food a little longer,_ the last text read.

Bucky took a snapshot of the breakfast he’d made and sent it over the phone.

It buzzed a moment later. _Not bad. Your crisp work could be better. Leave them in the pan for a few more minutes next time._

He set the phone down, raising his fingers in a casual salute before he slid the dirty pan into the sink.

Steve’s voice sounded behind him. “That Sam?” His hair was still damp from his shower, a simple white tank top clinging to his body - more appropriate for the rising summer heat than the layers Bucky was dressed in. He was back in his pants from the day before - Bucky would offer for him to run his clothes through the washing machine that evening.

Bucky headed over to the other side of the counter to pour himself a cup of coffee. “He’s got a mission.”

Steve shook his head, mouth contorting into a small, sympathetic grimace. “I remember those days.”

Bucky gave him a flat stare, handing him his plate. “It’s been six months.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, a smartass curl to his mouth. “Makes them really easy to remember.”

Bucky shook his head, his eyes going to the basement door despite himself. It was hanging open, and there were no audible noises coming up from the bottom of the stairs. That didn’t stop a tingling sensation from coursing up and down his spine. He really didn’t like Loki down there unattended. 

But after what had happened the first time he’d woken up, it seemed unlikely at this point he was going to have the physical capability to come bursting out in a murderous rampage any time soon. 

While Steve opened the fridge and pulled out a jug of juice, Bucky wandered over to the door. He walked through it and stood on the top of the stairs, staring down at the limp body draped over the exercise bench. 

Still real. Still staring emptily with those glassy, unmoving eyes on that hollow, ghostly face. Steve had arranged Loki’s broken wrist so his arm was resting over his torso; Bucky could see that the swelling around it had transformed into a brutal black, stretching over his hand and forearm.

He let the basement door slowly fall shut, making his way back towards the table. “At this point we probably should restart the timer.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Steve said, taking his seat. 

Bucky sat down opposite him and started breaking apart his eggs with his fork. “Was he out all night?”

A muscle jumped in Steve’s cheek as he reached for the salt. “Not so much as a nightmare. He’s still alive, though.”

“And we’re still letting him stay that way?”

Steve gave him a look which told him he found that joke about as funny as Bucky had found his earlier.

“Just checking,” Bucky said, spearing the egg onto the hash browns and taking a large bite. The splash of rosemary and garlic on his tongue made his brain light up - he made a mental note to put the hash brown recipe he’d used on his list of keepers. 

“We’ll keep him isolated,” Steve said. “At least until we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

Steve wasn’t anxious or irritated with the situation like Bucky was. He wasn’t excited about it, per se, but there was a calm sense of purpose that seemed to be driving him ever since he’d realized Loki had a pulse. 

It helped Bucky shake some of his paranoia. “You think he likes eggs?”

Steve paused with his glass of juice halfway to his mouth. “You know? I don’t actually know that much about him.”

“Other than he’s basically indestructible.” Bucky took another bite, gulping it down faster than the first.

“He’s definitely strong,” Steve said. “They told me ‘immortal’ when I first went up against him, and I didn’t really believe it then.”

“What about now?”

“Now, somehow it makes more _and_ less sense.”

Steve had just basically described how Bucky had felt about his entire life since he’d broken free of HYDRA’s programming. “Has Thor ever ended up that bad?”

“Not physically,” Steve said. “At least not that I’ve ever seen. Rocket said getting beat by Thanos and thrown into space after a ship exploded around him just made him need to nap for fifteen minutes to recover.”

“God,” Bucky breathed. “That’s the guy whose unliftable magical hammer you lifted?”

Steve dropped his eyes, his smile a little bashful. “That didn’t really have to do with strength.”

“Yeah, it did,” Bucky asserted. 

Steve’s smile widened. He tucked into his food.

Bucky kept looking towards the door, but the basement stayed quiet.

\----------

Sam texted Bucky to check in again that evening - his mission had just been a simple scuffle. _Nothing worth writing home about and no need to call anyone out of retirement._ He was still planning on coming over after he was done, barring any more criminal catastrophes.

Bucky didn’t mention the criminal catastrophe staying in his basement that had already effectively brought him and Steve out of retirement. He really hoped that this time jumping back in would end in something a little less hectic than an alien war and the slow dissemination of his molecules. 

He still dreamed about that, sometimes. He wondered if any of the others that had gone through it did. Half of all sentient life, haunted by the same memory.

They hadn’t talked about it - what had happened to Bucky. What Steve had been forced to watch, before his five years of mourning that had ended in the victory of all victories. 

It’d been the first time in their entire lives Bucky had ever seen Steve even entertain the idea of stopping. After he’d returned the infinity stones to their own timelines, he’d come back satisfied and heavy-hearted. Then he’d handed his shield over to Sam.

He’d disappeared for a couple of months after that. After Stark’s wedding, which had been a sparsely attended affair, and the post-war celebration, which had been exactly the opposite. He’d given a brief explanation that he was going to try to get a life, before he faded off everyone’s radar.

They hadn’t talked about that, either. How Romanoff had come to Bucky’s house clearly looking for leads on where Steve had gone. How Sam had come over to practice shield-throwing with Bucky in absence of its original owner. 

Maybe he’d taken a break. Maybe he’d spent some time in Wakanda after seeing how good it had been for Bucky. Or maybe he’d gone to help any number of the thousands of causes for post-apocalyptic collective trauma around the world, trying to clean up in the aftermath of the sudden reappearance of half of all life.

He’d come back eventually. Started working on running a self-help group a couple times a month. And every once in a while, there’d be a dimness to his eyes that looked as old as Bucky felt. 

Not now, though. Now, it was almost like Steve was remembering something.

\----------

Loki didn’t move for two more days. Bucky returned to his daily chores during Steve’s watches - he swept, watered the plants in the garden, checked the lettuce for signs of bolting, and pulled a few weeds. The parsley plants were still half-crushed but signs of new growth were already sprouting up from their centers. Bucky took a moment to be thankful Loki hadn’t hit something that was a little less able to bounce back.

He took his gun and walked the property multiple times a day. Other than the birds and a squirrel that barked warningly as it lashed its tail violently in the trees above, there were no signs of any infiltration. 

He took his own watches, stared at Loki’s unconscious body, and went back and forth on whether or not he believed what Steve had told him about the potential for a recovery. 

They hadn’t done shit. Hadn’t given Loki food, or fluids, or even very thorough bandages or splints - just a room with an even temperature and a somewhat padded exercise bench. Still, the bruises and burns were receding at the edges, and at a much faster rate than any human that would have somehow managed to keep going through that magnitude of damage.

Of course, Loki wasn’t human. But even after hearing the stories about Thor, Bucky found himself grudgingly impressed. And horrified.

And, fuck - _interested._

When the next burst into consciousness came, he and Steve were both in the basement in the middle of playing a game of cards.

Again, that sound was the first thing that came out - a broken cry that sent Bucky’s pulse firing on all cylinders and his jaw clenching. Having a full view of it as it happened didn’t make it any easier to handle.

Loki’s throat was stretched out, the areas where the swelling hadn’t deformed it starkly corded with tendons as he arched like someone had applied a taser slug to his spine. Then he slumped down, jerked to the side, and slid to the floor in a tangle of long limbs.

Steve was there first, trying to get Loki’s attention, even though it looked like Loki was just trying his damndest to crawl himself back into the bathroom on trembling limbs. The sweat pants almost immediately came down again past his wasted hips.

Bucky rushed in front of him, crouching down and clamping his metal hand firmly against a bony shoulder to stop him, to try and get him to _listen._

At the contact, Loki stopped completely, like he’d been stunned. A full body shudder vibrated through him and a half-choked wheezing noise threaded through his grinding teeth. For a moment, Bucky thought it felt like he was leaning _into_ the touch, like a frightened dog.

Then Loki violently twitched, and the look he directed to Bucky almost had him immediately letting go. 

Frightened dog had been apt. There was only animal terror in those eyes, the irises almost grey with how leeched they were of life. They showed nothing of any kind of sense, and when Loki finally seemed to regain himself and decide to fight Bucky, to keep going forward, his strength was…

He was _weak._

Of course he was, with the condition his body was in, but the way Steve had told it even Asgardian bones were as dense as vibranium. Bucky could feel the shoulder beneath his hand creaking, threatening to splinter with the lightest pressure.

Then Loki tried to jerk forward against Bucky’s grip, and there was a _crack_. 

The howl returned, an agonized symphony sending chills straight down Bucky’s spine. The body beneath his hand snarled, eyes wild and rolling from the bathroom towards him. 

That was what finally made Bucky let go. Instead of trying to continue his progress, Loki just curled in on himself on the floor, black hair spilling over his face, favoring the brand new injury Bucky had accidentally given him. 

Bucky clenched and unclenched his metal hand, a sick feeling in his stomach. What the hell was this?

“Loki,” Steve was saying urgently - he hadn’t noticed what Bucky had done. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

 _Too late,_ Bucky thought. His eyes went back to the neck injury, the marks that stood out the most harshly out of all of them.

Loki moaned, a whisper of a sound, and when he moved so his face was exposed again Bucky could see his eyelids fluttering. He seemed to slowly get control of himself. Instead of acknowledging Bucky or Steve, he just looked towards the bathroom again with wide eyes, feverish and desperate. He reached out with his good side, mindlessly trying to pull himself forward, new noises of strangled pain coming forth as he jostled his fresh injury.

Bucky didn’t know how Loki was even moving. His body looked like it was failing around him and he had to be in incredible pain, but he was driving himself through it towards the bathroom anyway.

What was in there that he wanted so badly?

Steve joined Bucky in blocking him, not putting any effort into physically restraining him but creating enough of a wall that he would have to put a considerable amount of energy into getting around them.

“Loki,” Steve tried again. “Stop. We’re here to help you.”

If Loki heard the words, he didn’t acknowledge them. But even he seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get much farther with the two man barricade in front of him. He slumped, eyes clamping shut, and let out another faint and hopeless moan that sent Bucky’s hackles up again.

“Let him go into the bathroom,” Bucky said, feeling like he just wanted all of this to stop. “He wants something in there.”

Steve looked at Bucky in confusion, but rose at the same time he did, and they watched as Loki again took up the journey on limbs that violently shook. The bathroom wasn’t far. Once inside of it, Loki collapsed, breaths moving in shallow hitches through his chest.

After almost a full minute of ignoring them in favor of just breathing, Loki swallowed roughly, his bloodshot eyes finally focusing on Steve. 

His lips moved, and he sounded exactly what Bucky thought he’d sound like, with a throat looking like that. Almost no volume, now that he wasn’t trying to shriek his guts out. His voice cracked and broke over each syllable, like his body had broken beneath Bucky’s grip. 

He wouldn’t stop writhing, or fighting to breathe. Just existing looked like it was killing him. 

He tried to speak again. It was almost unintelligible, but Bucky thought he saw the word _Captain_ shaped by his lips.

Steve moved closer to him, crouching down. Loki flinched, his good arm curling upwards to defensively cover his face as he clenched his fingers into his own hair. He was taller than both of them but huddled on the floor like that, his body nothing but skin and bones, he looked immeasurably small. He cringed from Steve, then started shivering like he was going into shock.

Maybe he was. Hell, from what Bucky had seen so far, he could probably _survive_ shock, easy as pie.

Steve spoke gently but firmly. “Loki, can you understand me?”

The shivering kept on. Steve tried a few more times before there was finally a response from behind the curved limb.

“Th...Thor,” Loki rasped, muffled and nearly silent.

“He’s not here,” Steve said. Loki twitched violently, sucking in another thread of a strenuous breath. “I can try to get a message out to him, but we’re not expecting him to come back to Earth for a long time.”

Loki made a desolate noise, curling further into himself. His chest jerked like he was trying to sob, and was cut off from doing so by stabs of pain from his injuries.

Steve leaned over him, but didn’t try to get closer when all that seemed to do was make Loki panic more, which in turn made his breathing grow agonizingly labored. “What do you need? We’d like to help you recover as much as we can.”

Loki made another wordless sound, just struggling to breathe for a few more seconds. His voice when it came back was a weak croak. “Need... _light_.”

And that was it from Loki for the night.

\----------

Bucky stood in the middle of his basement bathroom, trying to come down from the stress of what had just happened. “The fuck did he mean, ‘need light?’”

“I don’t know,” Steve said, staring down at Loki with confusion and not a small amount of new determination. He reached out carefully, touching the back of a limp hand, as if he was worried Loki was going to shoot back awake in terror.

Bucky’s own confusion and panic wasn’t letting him let it go. “It’s not some kind of alien thing?”

“It’s not anything I’ve seen with Loki before,” Steve said, sounding way too steady for what had just happened. He pressed his fingers to Loki’s neck again, against what was quickly becoming a kaleidoscope of bruising. “He’s still with us.”

Bucky looked between the basement and the bathroom, noting the disparity in brightness in the bulbs. “Is he afraid of the dark?”

“The first time I met him we ended up in the pitch black on a mountainside,” Steve said, setting his hand back on his knee. “He seemed pretty okay with it.” He did his own scan of the bathroom, like that would hold any answers.

“That was in 2012,” Bucky said, still tense.

“Yeah,” Steve confirmed.

“And everyone thought he was dead.”

“That’s what Thor told us.” He jerked a shoulder up and let it fall. “Except he’d thought he was dead about twice before that.”

“Right,” Bucky said, like he understood what the hell that meant. “So where was he?”

“I guess that’s the question,” Steve said.

Wasn’t it just. 

Bucky’s physiological responses to the situation were finally starting to calm down, though. 

Loki had been conscious for longer than he had last time. He’d _spoken._ It was all tracking with the rest of his body’s miraculous improvements.

Steve looked at Loki again, wincing at the sight of him, and then inched closer so he could start grimly rearranging his clothes to cover the damage. “If he wakes up outside of the bathroom again, he’s probably just going to have the same reaction.” 

Of course he would, Bucky thought. But the change in scenery wasn’t going to change much about the fact that Loki was still suffering just from being alive.

Steve stood up, gazing down at the crumpled body. “Do you have any extra blankets?”

Bucky swallowed harshly, broken out of his head by the question. “In the closet in the hall outside my room.”

“I’ll be right back,” Steve said.

Alone with Loki, Bucky didn’t move any closer to him. This close and having seen Loki’s nearly half-naked body, Bucky could tell now that it wasn’t just his grip that had hurt him. There was new bruising forming on the side of his face and torso and hip from where he had thudded against the floor after he’d fallen from the bench.

Bucky had the feeling that if he punched into Loki’s spine, it would snap like a brittle twig. 

Killing him would probably be simple. Bucky even wondered if it would be the more humane choice. He told himself it wasn’t concern making him think that - it was just expediency. 

But all arrows pointed to the fact that Loki was still improving. That didn’t make Bucky feel much better, considering it meant there was a possibility he’d one day wake up with his strength completely regained. They still didn’t know if he was going to be half as peaceful as in the stories of how he’d acted before his ‘death.’

Bucky sighed. After the way Loki had cowered, even he was starting to lose his hold on the conviction of those kinds of thoughts.

Steve brought down the blankets. Bucky helped to spread them out, layering them one on top of the other until they made a plush pile over the tiles. Then Steve carefully lifted Loki with gentle hands, and lowered him onto his new cradle of comforters on the bathroom floor.

Bucky watched him, and thought Loki was damn lucky that Steve had been here for this. “Guess you’re staying another night.”

“Guess so,” Steve said, sitting back on his heels.

Bucky stared, feeling another invisible barrier in his head come down. “I don’t do plaid or button down collared shirts.”

Steve looked up at him in surprise. He got to his feet, clapping Bucky on his shoulder. “Of course not. I didn’t expect you to have developed any kind of taste.”

Bucky’s responding smile felt a little weak, but he was going to call the fact that he’d managed to do it at all a win. 

Especially with the echo of Loki’s breaking shoulder still making the rounds in his head.


	3. Chapter 3

The last thing Steve had expected when he’d come to visit Bucky was for the man responsible for driving the very first Avengers to band together to make a surprise reappearance when he was supposed to have died years ago. 

Okay - maybe not the last thing. After time travel, there was some pretty steep competition in terms of expectations about the shocks life could bring.

Like the circumstances in which Loki had apparently died. The scattered details Steve had gotten about them had come in the midst of some of Thor’s drunken, emotional ramblings back when they’d been planning the Time Heist. 

According to Thor, Loki had done everything he could to help as many of the Asgardians as possible escape an attack. Then he’d given up the Tesseract to save Thor’s life, and went down trying to put a knife in Thanos’s throat.

At the time, Thor’s story had seemed pretty unbelievable. During Steve’s only encounter with him, Loki had been driven, insane, and gleeful for Earth’s subjugation. The Chitauri army hadn’t been his, but his intentions as its general had been real enough. 

But that had been years ago. Now Steve was looking at a grotesquely darkened neck, purple marks swimming in a sea of yellow. He had a feeling that if the Infinity Gauntlet had been there, its grasp would be a perfect fit against the worst hues of bruising and abrasions. 

Every other death Thanos had caused in his rampage had been a means to an end to achieve his mission. With Loki, it had been personal. 

Bucky had been giving Steve some pretty long-suffering looks since he’d brought Loki in, but other than the repeated suggestions that he thought finishing Loki off seemed like the best plan, Bucky hadn’t tried too hard to get rid of him. 

That was good. Without Thor around, Steve didn’t know how the rest of the world would react to Loki’s appearance. There were Asgardians still around on Earth, but even when it came to them Steve wasn’t sure what the current general consensus would be. And they kept things pretty well locked up from outsiders.

Besides all of that, Loki didn’t look like he was ready for a trip to Norway, let alone bundled in secret so no one would recognize him. Not that he was very recognizable in the condition he was in now - all but swimming in Bucky’s clothes, his sallow skin pulled paper-thin over his bones. The clothes covered a lot but they didn’t hide his arms, or his neck, or the way it looked like Steve could see every dip in his skull.

Bucky had only put his hand on Loki once, and from then on had let Steve handle him with a strange look in his eyes. When Steve questioned him on it, Bucky anxiously flexed the fingers of his metal hand.

“I think I broke his shoulder,” he said.

Steve pulled the collar of Loki’s shirt to the side and saw the fresh blotches of brilliant red-purple swelling that had formed beneath it, stretching into the hollow of his clavicle.

“There’s something going on with him,” Bucky said, the guilt in his eyes only growing stronger with the protest. “I hardly applied any pressure.”

“He’s still healing,” Steve said. He knew Bucky hadn’t done it on purpose. “If he can come back from everything else, he can come back from that, too.”

Bucky nodded, but he looked the furthest thing from reassured. “I don’t know how the hell he can just not breathe and keep going.”

“I don’t exactly know, either,” Steve answered honestly. “But he’s making progress.” 

Maybe not miraculously, like some of the things Steve had seen Thor shake off and keep fighting through - Thanos using his own ax to nearly bisect his chest, for one. But during his time as an active duty Avenger, Steve had gotten at least somewhat acquainted with what magic did for Thor physically. 

He had a feeling at least something similar would be in play for Loki. The transitioning bruises were a good sign.

Bucky didn’t have the background to make any similar hunches - his voice came out flat with disbelief. “Progress with no food or water or air. We’re still heads or tails on possible organ failure. How fast do you think his heart would give out if we tried an IV?”

Steve looked at Bucky, the exasperation he felt quick to fade when he realized that instead of yet another bad joke about them killing Loki, the question had instead been completely sincere. 

He crouched and put his hand back to Loki’s neck, noting the increase in disparate coolness of the skin beneath his. The pulse took its time. Bucky’s scowl grew deeper the longer Steve stayed silent. When the beat finally came, it was as faint as all the other instances he had checked.

He sighed, drawing his hand away and standing back up. “When he’s awake next time we can try something.” 

“His heart was racing when I touched him,” Bucky said. His metal fingers were fidgeting, his thumb rubbing in a circular motion against the other digits. “Like it was trying to make up for lost time.”

Steve remembered how Loki had come to life like someone jumpstarting a car - if the car had the ability to feel the pain of every watt of voltage tearing through it.

“Maybe it’s all part of the process,” Steve said, injecting his voice with calm. “You want me to take the first watch?”

“I’m starting to think he’s not going to cause any problems,” Bucky said with a cautious glance towards the main basement room. “Not for a while, anyway.” He looked down at his metal hand, staring at the shining surface, before he quickly dropped it. 

Steve frowned in concern, taking a step closer to him. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, but he only met Steve’s eyes for a second before he went back to staring at Loki. “Sam’s supposed to come over in two weeks. What do you think I should tell him?”

Sam would have probably made sure Steve was considering all avenues of how this could go extremely, severely wrong. As Bucky had pointed out, though, in Loki’s condition it didn’t look like any of those things were going to be of concern in their immediate futures.

Steve shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not sure he’d be that surprised.”

Bucky stared at him, resignation settling back in over his expression. He sighed, rotating his metal wrist. “I’m gonna go check the yard and water the plants,” he announced, heading for the stairs. “I’ll come back and relieve you in a few hours.”

\----------

_“Dance with me.”_

_“I don’t know...”_

_“Did you find someone else?”_

_“No. Not - no.”_

_“Then you’re not in any danger of being disloyal.”_

_“That’s not really the problem.”_

_“You’re worried I’m trying to convince you to stay.”_

_“I’m more worried that_ I’ll _want to.”_

_“Steve, I’m not naive enough to think that ending a single war means the end to all wars. We both have more we need to do. And if my work is what inspired you to yours, that’s all the more reason for me to continue it now. So be quiet, and give me your hand.”_

_“All right. I guess I did make a promise.”_

_“You’re damn right you did.”_

\----------

“Steve.”

Steve woke up in the dark of Bucky’s guest bedroom, like he had for every morning of the last week. His gaze went to the brightness of the hallway, where Bucky’s silhouette was a shadowed shape in the doorway. The night was balmy, enough that Steve had kicked off the blankets before drifting off, but Bucky was still dressed in the black jacket he’d donned for his perimeter check earlier in the evening. He’d tied his hair back, only a few of the shorter strands freely dangling over the front of his face.

It made it easier for Steve to see the tension in his expression from across the room. “Loki’s awake.”

Steve didn’t bother to change or put on shoes. He pulled himself from the bed and padded after Bucky as he led him back to the basement. 

“He didn’t scream this time,” Steve said as they descended the steps, thinking that was good news.

“No,” Bucky said. “But I’m not sure that makes whatever this is any better.”

Loki was still awake when they reached him, curled up on his side in the center of the blanket pile. The loose shirt he wore was riding up enough to bare a couple inches of his frail and wasted torso. His unkempt hair was gripped in his fist and his eyes were screwed shut. The ragged and shallow breaths that he managed to take in were edged by a tremor that it took Steve several seconds to recognize as weeping. 

With Loki’s injuries, the fetal posture he’d twisted into had to be especially painful to maintain. Whatever he was feeling emotionally was driving him to fight through it to stay huddled up. 

Steve frowned, not sure how to proceed with this change. “How long has he been like this?”

“About fifteen minutes,” Bucky said. He’d gone even tenser now that they were in the bathroom. “He won’t talk to me. I held out as long as I could before I went running to you.” He gestured unhappily to a bottle sitting on the floor - a couple feet away from the blankets, like he’d been worried about getting too close. “I offered him a drink. He didn’t take it.”

Steve took a step closer to Loki; Bucky stayed back where he was. 

Steve crouched down. This was only the third time Loki had woken up, but it was already starting to feel like a routine. 

He moderated the volume of his voice so it wouldn’t be excessive, but still loud enough to carry over the muffled noises coming from behind Loki’s clamped lips. “Loki, it’s Steve Rogers.”

Loki flinched, his shoulders coming up sharply. It wasn’t as severe a reaction as the last time he’d woken up, which was probably a small reassurance, if any at all. Steve was going to take it anyway.

He kept his tone even. “Do you think you can drink something?”

Loki didn’t respond, not even when the question was repeated to make sure he’d heard it.

Steve stared, wracking his brain for anything else he could do without setting Loki off. Running a support group for a few years had given him a few more tools in his box when it came to listening and talking to those in emotional distress, but usually it was better if the other party had the willingness to engage.

“What’s our next step?” Bucky asked. When Steve turned to look up at him, he met his eyes grimly. “If this is the same as the last couple of times, we probably only have another minute or two before he passes out again.”

Bucky was right. Steve looked at Loki again, both less certain that he knew what to do to help him and somehow more certain that getting anyone else involved would just make it worse.

Steve moved closer. Loki’s shuddering breaths went more erratic, but he didn’t try to move away. 

The reaction meant he was cognizant of the fact that Steve was there, though. In fact, when Steve changed his position just a few inches, he could see through the fall of hair that Loki’s bloodshot eyes had opened and were glued to the ground.

Steve reached out for the bottle Bucky had left, slowly and gently setting it closer. Loki flinched again, a noise sounding in his throat as his forehead pinched. His eyes darted up, and then back down. 

“We thought if you had something to drink it would help you recover,” Steve said.

Loki’s breath spurted in and out of his thin chest, his legs drawing in closer to his torso. He didn’t respond verbally, but Steve thought the twitch of a shake that he did with his head must have been a form of communication instead of an involuntary response.

No, he didn’t want it? Or no, it wouldn’t help him recover? 

Loki slumped before Steve could find out more, his hand falling limply from its grip on his hair. His face wasn’t quite slack, but the distress had left it. The room seemed oddly quiet without the sounds of him struggling to breathe.

Steve took stock of Loki’s condition, stamping down his frustration as he tried to take note of the continued improvements in his injuries. 

“He’s afraid of us,” Bucky said. “He thinks we’re going to kill him.”

Steve smoothed out the blanket so he could put the bottle even further within Loki’s reach. “Well, he’ll have to change his mind about that eventually, because we’re not.”

Bucky snorted, his voice dry. “Hopefully he does us a favor and realizes that before he gets his strength back.”

\----------

The next time, it took less than a day.

Bucky was upstairs making dinner, the sound of dishes clinking and savory scents drifting down to the basement. 

Steve had pulled a chair into the basement bathroom and was sitting curled over a sketchbook. The bruises on Loki’s body seemed to be getting fainter even faster, now. Steve found himself doing brief sketches of Loki’s hand and wrist once every hour, idly keeping track of their lessening intensity. 

The stilted breathing started first, making Steve glance up from his drawing. It was still awkward, like Loki was fighting to take in air against a heavy weight on his chest. Then his eyes shot open and he made an aborted convulsing motion against the blankets, grimacing. His gaze darted around the room, and Steve saw that the dramatic red splotches that had been all but consuming the whites of his eyes were beginning to recede.

They came to rest on Steve, and then Loki’s limbs went still. Air wheezed through his throat. He looked like…

Like he was trying not to move so he wouldn’t be noticed.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Steve said, for what felt like the dozenth time. 

Loki’s brow creased, as if Steve was speaking a language he didn’t understand. Then he shifted with a grimace, laboriously curling into himself, and closed his eyes. If not for the way he continued to struggle to breathe through parted lips, Steve would have thought he’d passed out again.

Unfortunately for Loki, he wasn’t going to waste this opportunity for communication.

“You stop breathing when you’re unconscious,” Steve said.

Loki shuddered, his eyes blinking back open. He didn’t look at Steve, or say anything in response.

“That bottle is still there,” Steve said, pointing with his pencil. “I can help you with it if you don’t think you can drink it by yourself.”

There was more of a reaction when it came to that statement - Loki hissed out a breath through clenched teeth. His fingers twitched, and he looked a little like he was bracing himself for an attack. 

Not a rousing sign of agreement or cooperation.

Before Steve could try his next method, approaching footsteps sounded on the stairs, with Bucky’s voice trailing down along with them. “I’m getting the feeling you’re not talking to someone on your phone.”

Loki hadn’t exactly reacted well to Steve, but when he heard Bucky coming, something in his eyes changed. It was like the fear and hate that was lingering at the backs of them just got dialed up to twenty and pushed to the front.

Bucky came to a stiff stop in the bathroom, henley sleeves still pulled up around his elbows. He stared down at Loki, his hands curled at his sides. “He’s up even quicker, now.”

Loki’s teeth were almost fully bared, eyes set in a full-on glare. The level of awareness was new - which meant it was more likely he had been trying to ignore Steve earlier, but he _definitely_ wasn’t ignoring Bucky.

Bucky noticed the look, and his whole demeanour changed. Not dramatically, but the way he held himself and the set of his jaw both went a little more rigid. Quiet, and focused. 

Loki’s eyes dropped to Bucky’s prosthetic. Bucky clenched his hands even tighter. 

“I was just telling Loki I could help him drink if he needed it,” Steve said, trying to bring the level of tension in the room back down.

“And what did he say to that,” Bucky asked, still not looking away from Loki.

“He hasn’t said anything,” Steve said. “Not since he woke up the first time.”

“When he said he needed the light and asked about Thor.”

At his brother’s name, Loki’s eyebrows pinched closer together. His gasps took on a harsher edge.

Steve sat a little straighter. “You’re reacting when we mention Thor,” he observed. 

Loki’s hand made a clawing motion. He broke eye contact with Bucky to look back towards Steve. His throat worked, and his voice came out in a halting rasp. “You said…” He didn’t keep going, and Steve didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t want to or because he was physically incapable.

Mindful of their short timeframe with Loki, Steve didn’t let his surprise at the return of spoken words stall his response. “We don’t know where he is,” he said. “But we’ll see if we can figure out a way to contact him.”

Instead of looking comforted, Loki’s snarl deepened. Then, a second later, his face just - crumpled. He quickly brought his arm up to hide it, pressing his forearm over his eyes, sinking his fingers back into his hair. The shuddering cry-breaths made a return.

A cooking timer went off upstairs, sharp and insistent. Bucky swore under his breath, a reaction that Steve might have teased him about if he wasn’t still distracted by Loki all but openly sobbing on the floor.

“I’m not helping here, anyway,” Bucky said, vacating the room without another word.

Loki had no reaction, relief or otherwise, to Bucky leaving. He just kept making soft sounds in his throat, his eyelids clamped closed.

Steve set down his sketchbook and slid from the chair, thinking that this time he wasn’t going to just let Loki huddle there and suffer. He carefully reached out.

Loki slumped in a dead faint before he could touch him.

Steve froze, then gently pressed his fingers to Loki’s quickly chilling neck, waiting patiently for the telltale thump.

That could have gone better.

He gathered his sketchbook and his pencil, and turned the page back to the one that was riddled with an uneven row of Loki’s injured hand. It had now fallen in a different spot from where it had been when Steve had drawn them, and Loki’s body was casting heavy shadows over the bruises, making them appear darker. His fingers were contorted, curled close to his chest.

Steve sighed. He put his pencil to paper and started a new row.


	4. Chapter 4

The world flashed in and out. 

Each time he woke it was with the same burst of his jaggedly pumping heart. The same bright panic that threatened to choke him. And when it did not, there was still an overbearing weight upon his limbs and chest, making every breath he did manage to drag through his dry throat that much more of an arduous labor.

But there were also changes.

Amongst them were the soft blankets that cradled his body and cushioned his bones from the harshness of the ground. There was an encompassing warmth that spread all around him and kept the chill from his deadened limbs. A light that spread its radiance to every corner of the room, so bright he could even see it even when his eyes were shut.

And, more importantly, there was air. 

It brought with it sounds and smells and signs of life. They were sometimes harsh and overwhelming, yet now when he felt his body begin to drag him back down, being forced to leave was almost as terrifying as when he woke to the crush of the world.

For the world _was_ still crushing, and his growing desire to stay conscious within it did not dampen the physical pain he felt, or the despair that rose every time he managed to _think_ beyond his primal urges. 

However, each shuddering burst into consciousness revealed that the comforts that had been given to him were lasting. Beyond the metal-armed man wounding him, neither he nor the Captain had further damaged him.

Maybe they believed that with that action, their point had been proven. Whatever the reason, he knew they had to be well aware that in his present condition, he was no threat. He needed time, and he had...he had _hoped_...

What he had hoped for had not come to pass.

Even though the Captain and his friend did not actively seek to harm him, neither would they leave him in peace. They asked him questions - though mostly the Captain. Questions that seemed geared towards attempting to get him to improve his own well-being.

It made little sense. Perhaps they wanted him well enough that they might instigate further interrogations. Perhaps their world had ended just as much as his. But if it had, how he had come to fall into their hands made even less sense. 

It did not change the fact that his options were extremely limited, if severely better than...before.

And he barely remembered who he was, beyond the broken body that suffered and yearned and withstood the sensations that buffeted him like waves upon a crumbling rock. But the threads were now slowly starting to come together, and with them, a choice: to continue, or to fade.

After everything he had survived so far, it seemed that one of those things was substantially more likely.

\----------

Steve was beginning to wonder if Bucky could sense something he couldn’t.

Their watches had gotten looser as the days went on. Bucky cooked and tended to his garden and went for runs. Steve did the dishes and went for his own jogs and spent a lot of time buried in his sketchbook. Mornings and evenings they mostly spent together, but somehow Bucky still managed to time it so he wasn’t in the basement each of the next few times Loki woke up.

It didn’t seem like it would have made a difference who was watching him, because Loki did an excellent job of almost ignoring Steve completely for two entire rounds of his brief consciousness.

Steve could tell Loki was still aware of his surroundings. He reacted to movements - though mostly with flinching and near-hyperventilation. He even responded once with a tense and adamant refusal when Steve tried to bring up the subject of eating or drinking. 

Most of the time, he just looked like he was just trying his hardest to disappear. 

If Steve had been younger, he might have been a lot more worried that he was out of his depth. He might have shared Bucky’s heavy anxiety about Loki’s condition and engaged in the same second-guessing. From powerful would-be world conqueror to cowering on the basement floor in Bucky’s clothes, unable to even stand, Loki didn’t exactly paint the image of someone on the road to recovery. 

He’d been through a lot. Steve didn’t know what, exactly, but he knew it couldn’t have been good. Or quick. And his identity didn’t change the fact that just looking at how he acted while awake was enough to make Steve’s stomach ache.

For a while, there wasn’t much sense of moving forward beyond the changing injuries. Steve had more pages of his sketchbook filled now, mapping the reduction in swelling and changes in intensity of his marks. Bucky took surreptitious looks at them when he came down to hand off whatever meal he’d prepared, still seemingly baffled about Loki’s healing. 

Then, one day, Loki finally took the drink.

Steve didn’t know what prompted it. Loki had moved so slowly and quietly while Steve was engaged enough with his current drawing that he almost didn’t see it happen at all.

He looked up in time to see the grimace that came over Loki’s face as he twisted the cap off with the gargantuan effort of a trembling grip. He took a quick mouthful, and froze, an odd expression coming over his face. He’d probably been expecting plain water, Steve thought, instead of something flavored by electrolytes and minerals. He didn’t spit it out, but swallowed like he was reluctant to do it, followed by a wince of discomfort. He just as soon raised the bottle back to his mouth. Again, that pause came, though this time it seemed calmer, Loki’s eyes directed somewhere into the middle distance. Then, he gulped convulsively, setting the bottle aside.

Steve felt something inside of him loosen with relief. “What changed now?”

Loki’s eyes darted to Steve, briefly, like he was just remembering he was there. He was clearly nervous, but it didn’t look like he was out and out panicked like he had been before.

Steve rearranged his grip on his pencil. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Loki’s eyes twitched, and then narrowed. His jaw clenched and he laboriously moved himself with his good arm, twisting his long legs, favoring a dozen seen and unseen hurts. He carefully slumped back against the wall behind him with a small sound of exertion, his long legs nearly forced to bend as they came up against the rustic cabinets across from him. He stared at Steve through half-lidded eyes, his chest moving in strangely rough bursts. 

A shudder wracked his thin frame and his throat worked. “Are you planning on killing me?”

The words, like all the others Loki had spoken, were whispered. But there was a flatness to them - to his entire face, especially the near-grey eyes that stared unblinkingly at Steve. He didn’t sound like he cared about the answer to that question one way or the other.

But then Steve set down his pencil, and Loki flinched violently enough that he let out a sharp grunt of agony through bared teeth as his injuries protested. 

Bucky had been right. Loki _was_ scared of them. Even now, when it looked like he was coming back enough to talk and realize where he was.

“No,” Steve said. “We found you injured in the yard. We brought you inside so you could get better.”

Loki blinked rapidly. His breaths were still too quick, his haunted gaze darting calculatingly over Steve. “Why?”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “We weren’t just going to leave you out there.”

Loki’s brow twitched minutely. “Shouldn’t you have called your Earth authorities to cage me?”

Steve let the continued speaking encourage him that they were going down the right route. “It didn’t seem needed,” he said wryly.

Loki didn’t appreciate the humor. If anything, the wariness in his eyes grew. They jumped around the room, though there really wasn’t much for him to take in besides the shower and the toilet and the blankets he was resting on. His mind looked like the wheels were turning at full speed but he was starting to lose what little energy he’d had to begin with. There was a tremble in his limbs that was growing more pronounced and just as Steve realized it was more physical than psychological, Loki collapsed back down onto the blankets.

Steve stood from the chair but his movement was met with a sharp hiss and a raised arm and legs curling in close.

Steve kept himself back with frustrated effort, moderating his tone. “We’re not locking you up unless you give us a reason to. There’s no ulterior motives here. We’d like to know what happened to you but that’s not exactly necessary right now.”

Loki took in a shuddering breath. His arm dropped enough that Steve could see his scowl and viciously grinding teeth through the fall of black strands.

He didn’t believe him. Not yet. 

He was also making odd noises at the end of each breath. Steve belatedly noticed that Loki must have landed on the shoulder Bucky had crushed days before. 

“Let me help you move to a better position,” Steve said. 

Loki snarled, arm jerking again in an aborted motion. “Do not. Touch me.”

He was losing his grip. Steve could see the angry glint to his eyes dimming, the way his breathing went more and more ragged as he faded. 

Then he let out a noise that was like a whimper, and slumped the rest of the way down.

Steve ground his jaw, his stomach slow to recover from its odd jolts at the encounter. 

Loki was still on his injured shoulder.

Steve moved him further from the wall by pulling the blankets along with him, so he could roll him onto his back with the least contact possible. Then he paused, frowning. Loki felt...different. With a jolt Steve realized that his chest was still moving.

He put his hand to his neck.

His pulse was steady.

\----------

“I’ll be damned,” Bucky said when he found out, eyes locked on Loki’s expanding chest. The shock in them faded as he sighed, meeting Steve’s gaze, a muscle in his cheek jumping. “So he’s _really_ our problem, now.” 

It didn’t exactly change how long Loki stayed unconscious, but his healing rate took a major change for the better - more in line with what Steve would have expected from Thor. In no time the bruises were all but gone, only faded red marks left in their wake. 

And when he woke up again, it was slower - less like his soul was being jolted back into his own body and more like a heavy sleeper struggling to rouse. His bleary eyes darted around his surroundings, lips thinning before he dropped his head back down, gaze directed upwards. 

It was just Steve; Bucky had gone out for groceries not long ago.

“Captain,” Loki said, Adam’s apple bobbing with a swallow, head and arms pressing deeper indentations into the plush blankets beneath him. “Do you have nothing better to do?”

“You’re sounding a lot better,” Steve noted. Still low and hoarse, but there were actually tones of the old Loki in there, instead of just a strained whisper.

Steve brought over a fresh bottle, watching the way Loki twitched and breathed faster as he approached. When his eyes went to the offering, Steve wondered if it was just his imagination or if they were bluer than the last time he’d been up. 

He rolled over after Steve retreated and reached out for the bottle with hands that still shook, but a grip that seemed a bit more steady. He drew the lip of it to his mouth, eyes clamping shut as he drank.

Steve had thought that response was pain, earlier. Now he wasn’t so sure. 

“Why did you refuse to drink anything earlier?”

Loki lowered the bottle but didn’t let go of it. He stared down, his thumb running over the rim of its opening, shoulders curled forward.

“I’m only asking because it seems like it’s helping you now,” Steve said. 

“My body has a...particular process when it is near death,” Loki said. He shuddered, lips parting as his eyes fluttered closed again. “To prevent my own expiration, the majority of its functions...stop.”

“So abstaining was to facilitate that,” Steve said. “I was wondering if you were trying to kill yourself.”

A soft breath of a laugh. “If only it were that simple,” he said, taking another drink. This time a low humming noise followed his swallow, and when he opened his eyes, they came to rest on Steve and stayed there. “We are underground.”

Steve wasn’t sure how Loki could tell that. “We’re in my friend Bucky’s house. This is his basement.”

Loki’s eyes looked Steve up and down, considering. His shaking was getting more pronounced. “Your world, then...it still stands.”

Steve stiffened in interest. “Is there a threat you think we should know about?”

Loki laughed again, with a slash of a grin and eyes that took on a bright sheen. He was losing his grip on the bottle. “I beg your pardon,” he said, and his voice trembled just as much as his body. “I believe I am about to faint.”

Steve was up and rushing forward, catching Loki as he slumped back. His palm braced between bony shoulder blades and Loki convulsed against his hand like he’d been shocked.

“Ah,” Loki gasped, eyes wide, hands clawing at the blankets as his chest heaved. “You-”

He went limp against Steve, who held him for a moment in confusion at the change before he carefully laid him the rest of the way down. Loki’s head lolled to the side. His cheeks were wet, which at least meant he had enough moisture to produce tears.

Steve double checked Loki’s back for injuries, but though he was still distressingly thin, it didn’t look like there was anything new from Steve’s interception of his fall. 

He carefully arranged Loki’s limbs on the blankets, and picked up the used bottle to take it upstairs and replace it.

\----------

Steve told Bucky what had happened over dinner. 

“You sure he wasn’t talking about Thanos?”

Steve paused. He glanced towards the open bathroom door, where he could see Loki resting. “No, actually.” 

Loki had been _missing._ Steve hadn’t considered that he might not be aware of what had happened between the time the Asgardians had been attacked on their way to Earth and now. It made some of his previous confusion make a little more sense. 

When he turned back Bucky was looking that way, too. “He was trying to get information out of you.”

Steve gave Bucky a look. “You’re saying that like I shouldn’t talk to him.”

Bucky shrugged. “You can pick up a half-dead squirrel, that doesn’t mean you should be surprised when all it does when it gets better is try to bite the shit out of you.”

Steve raised his eyebrows in interest. “Are you speaking from experience?”

Bucky shook his head, looking mildly disgruntled. “Still screams at me every damn day.”

“Maybe that’s just how it shows affection,” Steve teased. 

Bucky sent him a flat look. “We should figure out where he came from. Just to be sure he isn’t talking about something else.”

Steve shook his head, giving his own sigh as he thought about how fast Loki had deteriorated during their interaction. “That might be a better conversation for when he’s able to stay awake longer than fifteen minutes at a time.”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed and he looked like he was about to argue. Instead, he shook his head, poking at his food. “Not sure why I’m surprised.”

Steve jerked his head up, frowning. “Surprised about what?”

“Nothing,” Bucky said, but it was clearly something. “Maybe just wear a thick pair of gloves when you handle him. Just in case.”

\----------

Steve finished up the last of the dishes and set them in the rack to dry. The house was finally starting to cool down after another scorching day, but it wasn’t enough for him to consider putting on any more layers. After the serum, he’d always run warm. 

He heard Bucky’s voice drifting up from the basement - sounded like his avoiding-Loki streak had ended. Steve approached but he didn’t go down, just lingered at the top to listen.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he heard Bucky say, voice hard. 

Whatever Loki’s response was, it was too weak to carry to the top of the stairs. 

Bucky’s answer was flat. “Don’t give me a reason, and it won’t be a problem.”

Another pause while Loki talked. This time Steve caught a hint of the tone - not exactly friendly, but it sounded a lot less guarded than when he’d been trying to analyze Steve’s motives.

“Not as short as you think,” Bucky said. 

This time when Loki spoke, Bucky stayed quiet for a long moment. “No. Why the hell would it?”

Bucky came up a few minutes later while Steve was wiping down the counters. “He woke up but he’s out again,” he announced.

“I heard some of it,” Steve admitted, and saw the corners of Bucky’s eyes tighten.

The fridge door opened, glass clinking as Bucky pulled out a couple bottles of beer. “He was trying to gauge my threat level.”

He’d done that with Steve, too. Steve took the offered beer, and got a flash of the calm between battles, a dimly lit bar and the smell of cigarettes and the clamoring voices of drunk soldiers. “You should have told him about the squirrel.”

Bucky gave a humorless smile that was fast to fade. He leaned his shoulder against the fridge, snapping the cap off of his bottle with a twist of metal fingers, taking a quick swig. “I don’t think it’s good for me to be down there with him.”

“It didn’t sound that bad,” Steve said. “He’s still confused. If Thor was right, he’ll come around.”

Bucky downed another few swallows. “Trying to gauge my threat level wasn’t all he was doing.”

Steve frowned, concerned. “Was he threatening you?”

“Maybe.” Bucky slowly shook his head, pressing his lips together. “I don’t know. If he was it was in a really fucked up roundabout way.” Bucky looked - well, he was quiet enough to be mostly unreadable a lot of the time, but Steve had gotten the hang of seeing the storms in his eyes, the guilt that came and went like lightning strikes. 

He tried to sound reassuring. “You know, I’m not exactly the expert when it comes to this, either.”

“You don’t need to be the expert,” Bucky said. “You can just be...you. That’s more than enough for most people.” He set the unfinished beer on the counter and turned to walk towards the front door, grabbing a jacket off a nearby rack and shrugging into it.

“Time to water the plants?” Steve asked.

“They’re not gonna do it themselves,” Bucky responded, pulling his hair back and threading it through a tie he’d taken from his pocket. “Plus I think the damn aphids are back.”

Steve folded his arms, his own beer still unopened. “I’m pretty sure Tony had some kind of automated system in place for everything on his properties.”

“I’m not asking for any more handouts from Stark,” Bucky said, voice tight as he opened the front door, letting the fresh air rush in. “And I wouldn’t want it, anyway.” 

The door shut. Steve walked to the window beside it and pulled the curtain aside to watch as Bucky pulled a hose from its reel and walked towards the garden fence, his metal hand glinting orange in the sunset. As he watered he kept his arm outstretched with the nozzle clutched in his palm, as if he was ready at any moment to bring his other hand up to it in a modified weaver stance. 

Steve let the curtain fall closed, frowning. When he went back downstairs Loki was positioned with his head towards the bathroom door, on his side with both arms outstretched in front of him like he’d been reaching for something. 

If Steve had been younger, he might have had bigger misgivings about the situation. 

He grabbed the card table from the rec room and pulled it until it sat just outside the bathroom door. He set his beer and sketchbook on its surface, already starting to plot out a comic in his head about a soldier battling against giant aphids.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a beautiful day outside. 

The scorching temperatures of the last couple of weeks had finally given way to something a bit less necessitating the complete barricading of the house to prevent any additional heat from rushing in. That meant the windows could actually be left open to let the breeze enter without risking suffocating everyone inside.

That was good. Because Bucky figured he wasn’t going to get the chance to go outside again for at least a few hours. Not with Captain America sitting across from him, nursing a glass of water, his shield propped up against the leg of the table, digesting both a mint fruit salad and Bucky’s blunt admission about the fact that there was an injured and possibly violent former Earth invader staying in his basement bathroom.

Sam took a slow drink, dark eyes locked onto Bucky’s face. “Most people just go out and adopt a dog.”

Bucky lifted his shoulders in a brief shrug. “I figured he’d be better at keeping the raccoons away.”

“Oh, we’re joking about this.” Sam folded his arms over his chest, leaning back in his seat. “This is a joking situation.”

“It has to be, at this point,” Bucky said, slowly twirling his fork in his hand. “I tried moving out into the middle of nowhere twice to step out of it. The aliens just seem to keep showing up.”

Sam sighed, eyes going to the silverware still dancing about in Bucky’s grip. “At least get some better material,” he said. He reached for another sip of water, though Bucky thought it was mostly because he needed an excuse to take another moment to think. “So he fell out of the sky.”

“No.” After the injuries that had developed any time Loki fell so much as a couple of feet, _that_ Bucky was at least sure of. An actual crash into the ground from any kind of height would have...well, he wasn’t sure if it would have killed Loki, but he didn’t like imagining what the end result would have been.

“No?” Sam raised his eyebrows. “You’re saying he didn’t walk in, and he didn’t fall, and he wasn’t carried in...but somehow he’s here.”

“It’s a work in progress figuring it out,” Bucky admitted. “Steve said he’s got magic. Like Wanda and Thor and Strange, but different.”

“So it was Steve’s idea to bring him in,” Sam said, sounding unsurprised.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “You think _I_ would have decided to play nurse to someone with that kind of history?”

“Good point. You do seem to prefer to be on the other side of those types of arrangements.”

Bucky stared at Sam in exasperation, finally dropping the fork back down onto his plate with an audible clank. “I was in hiding.”

A teasing glint entered Sam’s eyes. “Right. Playing hard to get.”

Instead of answering, Bucky rolled his eyes and reached over and took their dishes, setting them in the sink and giving them a quick rinse off. Somewhere outside, he could hear a song sparrow throatily send out a series of bright trills. 

When he turned back to Sam he was stretching in his seat, hands hooked together overhead and eyes on the basement door. “I guess that’s my cue to go down and take a look at the potential supervillain.” 

He dropped his arms and rolled his neck, then reached for his shield. He wasn’t wearing anything but a short sleeved shirt and jeans, but the way he stood with the confidence of someone wearing full body armor made Bucky think he’d gotten way more faith in his shield-using capabilities since they’d practiced. 

“He probably won’t be awake,” Bucky said, letting Sam take the lead as they walked down the basement stairs. “He spends about ninety nine percent of his time unconscious. Steve thinks it’s to do with his healing process.”

“I can’t say I’m going to be disappointed about that,” Sam said. “I was already thinking he was going to need to take a number if he wanted to join all the other assholes of the week.”

Steve was already up when they reached the floor level, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe so he could keep his eyes on Loki and still watch Sam and Bucky as they came down at the same time. Not drawing for once, but he was still holding his sketchbook between his arm and torso. 

“Sam,” Steve greeted with a smile. “Sorry I missed lunch.”

“Yeah, I thought it was weird - but then Barnes explained, and it just got whole hell of a lot weirder.” 

Steve moved aside, and Sam went in through the doorway, coming to an immediate stop as he saw Loki for the first time. Back in the main part of the basement, Bucky moved himself so he could see through the gaps between them and towards what Sam was looking at - Loki, curled up on a thick pile of blankets, legs and arms pulled in close like he was trying to make himself small or conserve heat.

Sam didn’t speak for a long moment, brow drawn down as he took in the thin limbs, and the fading marks on Loki’s skin, and the way that even in sleep he breathed like every inhale was a fight he could lose at any moment.

“Okay,” he finally said, mouth set in a grim line. “I can see why you’d bring him in.”

“This is actually a lot better than he looked last week,” Steve said.

Sam looked aghast, finally breaking his gaze away. “He looked _worse_ than this?”

Steve pulled his sketchbook out from beneath his arm, flipping through it to show some of the gruesome drawings he’d done of Loki’s initial condition. Sam exhaled heavily and swore under his breath.

“So you’re looking at an extended physical rehabilitation process,” Sam said. He turned his head to look at Bucky. “And you think the best place for it is your basement bathroom.”

Bucky didn’t like that Sam was still giving him some of the credit for bringing Loki in. But saying something like _if it were up to me, he’d be fertilizing the snap peas_ wasn’t going to go over well. 

All he said was, “What hospital do you want to be unlucky enough to take him?”

“First choice? One on the other side of the world in Norway.”

“We did think of that,” Steve said. “But he’s not going to make it through any kind of transport without getting injured.”

Sam looked to Bucky, again like he was asking for clarification.

Bucky shrugged. “Steve’s been able to handle him, but the only time I touched him his shoulder ended up breaking.”

Sam darted his gaze down to Bucky’s metal hand. “How hard did you grab him?”

Bucky drew the prosthetic back, defensive. “I didn’t even clench down.”

“You sure? Historically when you feel threatened subtlety isn’t exactly your _first_ choice.”

“He didn’t,” Steve said, while Bucky griped, “I’m _not_ feeling threatened.”

Sam gestured towards Loki. “Then how come I got a whole guilt-ridden speech about you knowing the dangers of this guy when he’s just a pile of skin and bones that spontaneously fractures at the lightest touch?”

Okay - it did sound a little dumb when Sam put it that way. 

His face pinched, Bucky shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s not gonna stay like that forever.”

“Isn’t that the point of this?” Sam gestured to the crumpled form on the floor. “The sooner he gets better, the sooner his ass is on the back of a fishmonger truck heading to New Asgard.” He looked towards Loki again, the line over his eyes softening. “It does seem like he’s pretty damn comfortable in there.” He turned glanced at Bucky. “Is that your entire closet?”

“It’s too hot for blankets right now anyway,” Bucky said, still stinging. 

Sam pointedly gave Bucky’s pants and jacket a once over. “Uh-huh.” He looked towards Steve. “So did you actually talk to him about it, or did you decide this was just what you were doing?”

Steve crinkled his brow. “Who, Loki?”

“No, not Loki - the sergeant whose house you commandeered to play Asgardian doctor simulator.”

“It’s fine,” Bucky said, an odd sharpness jolting through his insides. When Sam met his eyes, he held his gaze steadily. “I wouldn’t want him trying to deal with it on his own.”

A low moan broke into the room, drawing all of their attention. Loki was waking up.

Steve instantly moved further inside the bathroom, while Bucky hung back. Sam stayed where he was, frowning as he watched Loki’s breathing change and his limbs start to move. 

The way he came back to consciousness now was at least easier to watch. He curled tighter into himself for a moment, before his eyes opened and he stared at the bare wall across from him in something like resignation. Then his gaze flicked towards Steve, and he froze; the return of his ability to think beyond panic didn’t mean he didn’t recognize his own vulnerability.

When he looked beyond Steve, to Sam and Bucky, his expression and posture went even more wary.

“Loki,” Steve said, and Loki gave a rapid blink of a flinch. “This is Sam. He’s a friend.”

That was a very basic description, Bucky thought, even as Loki drifted his eyes towards the shield that Sam was holding loosely in his hand.

“Hi,” Sam said, sounding only slightly awkward. “I heard you made quite the entrance.”

Loki looked like he would prefer to sink through the floor than have a conversation. He swallowed roughly, hands curling. “Are you...here to take me?”

Sam frowned at the hoarse question, the dullness to the words, and looked back at Bucky again like he was thinking about blaming him for that reaction. 

The lines of his face smoothed out as he looked back to Loki. “Is there somewhere you want to go?”

Loki looked taken aback by the question, his fingers curling into the blankets as he started to fight to push himself up. “What do you want?”

His breathing was becoming even more of an audible struggle. Steve took a half-step forward like he wanted to help him, but a cornered look from Loki stopped him from coming closer.

Meanwhile, what lingering remnants of tension Sam’d had as Loki had woken up seemed to have faded completely. When Loki finally managed to prop himself up against the wall to stay somewhat upright, Sam deliberately set the shield aside. Loki’s eyes tracked it as it was placed on the floor, back curled like he was ready to prostrate himself back down at any moment.

“Mostly I’m here to make dinner for my culinarily-challenged friends here,” Sam said, slowly straightening back up. Bucky gave him a look at being lumped in with Steve. “Barnes’s got a whole lot of tomatoes that are going to go to waste if I don’t step in.”

Loki frowned, darting his gaze between all three of them, still clearly confused and now squinting like he had a headache. Cautiously, on weak limbs, he pulled himself the rest of the way into a sitting position, still using the wall for the majority of his balance.

He shook some of the tangled, scraggly hair back, staring at Sam with eyes that looked too large on his thin face. “But you know who I am,” he eventually said.

“Kind of hard not to,” Sam responded. “And your brother might have mentioned you once or twice.”

Loki’s face shuttered like a door being slammed. His gaze lowered, and his body curved forward.

One of the more dramatic reactions that Bucky didn’t quite get, and neither he or Steve had figured out just yet.

“He’s probably gonna be over the moon when he realizes you’re still alive,” Sam said, still talking like Loki hadn’t just given the response of someone who’d been gut-punched.

There wasn’t a positive acknowledgment to that; Loki lowered his head even further, face creasing. He brought up bony fingers to clench into his hair with a soft, desolate sound.

It was bad enough that Sam was forced to comment on it. “Was it something I said?”

Loki didn’t respond; a shudder ran through him. Bucky would bet good money that the tears were going to make another appearance in the next few seconds.

“Loki,” Steve was saying, and Loki cringed away without looking at him, shoulders tight. 

“Any time we mention Thor, he acts like that,” Bucky said lowly to Sam while Steve kept trying to break Loki out of it. He really wished he could just retreat back to the garden.

“So that’s a no on sending any space telegrams,” Sam said.

Bucky scrunched his forehead. “Is that a thing?”

Steve had stopped trying to actively engage with Loki and was just staring at him in frustration and concern. 

“Maybe give him some space, Steve,” Sam said.

Steve looked at him, then nodded, taking a few steps back. A small drop rolled down Loki’s nose and dropped onto the blanket beneath him, darkening its surface. He was gasping, shuddering, like he was trying to muffle any sounds he made so they wouldn’t hear that he was crying. 

Sam moved forward just a few inches. “Look, I know who you are, but I’m not going to pretend that I _know_ you. Your brother’s not on Earth right now, so if what you’re worried about right now is him coming down to beat your ass, you can rest easy knowing it’s probably going to be months if not years before he comes back to visit our planet.”

Loki went still, chest shaking with a few more deep inhales. He dropped his hands, and the expression of loss didn’t leave him so much as transform into a deeper scowl. He looked up at Sam with reddened and watery eyes. 

Bucky stood at attention, shocked at the recovery.

Loki’s voice sounded clogged from his own weeping. “You are...speaking of Thor as if he was here recently.”

“He hasn’t been here for a few months,” Sam said, and Loki watched his face carefully, avidly. “He headed out on a ship to the farthest reaches to go find himself.”

Loki’s eyes went bright, almost feverish. He leaned forward, almost falling in his eagerness, clutching roughly at the blankets to hold himself up. His throat worked, and more tears were slipping down his face, but he ignored them. “He...what?”

“He took off with a few space buddies,” Sam explained, keeping his voice unwaveringly calm. 

Loki’s eyes widened and he bared his teeth. “He’s _alive?_ ”

Sam jerked, then gave Steve and Bucky some stern looks. “You guys told him his brother was dead?”

“No, we didn’t,” Steve said. “I told him I could get a message out to Thor, and he…” Steve trailed off, looking even more frustrated. “We didn’t know. Loki - if there’s anything you want to ask, you can.”

Loki had lowered his head again, just breathing through the force of his emotions. He didn’t immediately acknowledge Steve, but after a minute, his voice came back out, tremulous and whisper-thin. “Where did my brother go?”

 _Great first question,_ Bucky thought in foreboding, just as Steve guiltily answered, “We don’t know.”

Loki closed his eyes, his arms shaking as his hands gripped tighter into the blankets. He didn’t shut down completely even if he looked like he was strongly considering it. “But you saw. Him.” 

“He lived on Earth for five years,” Steve said, looking relieved he could at least offer that much.

Loki opened his eyes, staring up at Steve beseechingly. “Thor made it to Earth. After Thanos.”

“Yes,” Steve answered with a nod. “He told us that _you_ didn’t make it.”

Loki let out a startled huff of a breath, staring forward at nothing. “Five years,” he repeated, as if in a daze. “But...Thanos…”

Bucky scowled, feeling on edge. “What about Thanos?”

“He succeeded,” Loki said, shuddering again, and this time when he started he didn’t stop. “He won. He-” He broke off, like he couldn’t take any more of his own words.

“He did,” Sam said. “But not permanently.” He shrugged a shoulder towards Bucky in indication. “You’re looking at two guys that crumbled to dust when he snapped his fingers. We were all brought back.”

“Brought back,” Loki said, like a prayer. “ _Brought back._ ”

“Is that what happened to you?” Sam asked.

“No,” Loki said. His face formed the shadow of a grin that it just as soon dropped. He shook his head, looking shell-shocked, arms trembling violently. “No. Not at all.”

Sam got a firsthand experience of seeing Loki black out.

\----------

Steve carefully grasped at Loki, maneuvering his body with practiced hands and arranging his limbs so he’d be more comfortable.

Sam slowly picked up his shield, backing up so he was next to Bucky again. “It’s always that fun, huh?”

“You missed the stage where he’d just wake up screaming,” Bucky said, watching Steve check Loki’s pulse like an afterthought.

“He’s holding onto consciousness for longer every day,” Steve said as he straightened, even if his face didn’t match the hope in that statement. “His heart’s getting stronger.”

“So you’re saying it wasn’t just my fantastic people skills that drew him out of his shell,” Sam remarked. 

Steve looked towards Bucky. “You were right.”

“Right about what?” Sam asked.

“Loki didn’t know we beat Thanos,” Bucky said. “He acted surprised when Steve told him we hadn’t been overthrown.”

They’d gotten a few answers, and a whole hell of a lot of new questions had slid in to make up for that. 

Sam looked back at Loki, considering. “He was definitely talking like someone who was on our side of the war when it all went down.” He looked sidelong at Bucky. “You got any more bedding hidden anywhere?”

Bucky blinked rapidly. “Are you staying?”

Sam shrugged. “Just for a few days, if I don’t get called in for work. Give you an extra set of hands in the kitchen. By which I mean, I’ll be the _only_ hands in the kitchen, unless I need you for the grunt work.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said, full of sarcasm. “Then you can finish the dishes.”

Sam lifted his shield. “And you can go out and harvest me a nice basket of tomatoes and as many peaches as you can get off of your tree.”

“We just ate,” Bucky said flatly.

“What, you want a nap, first?”

Behind Sam, Steve was looking at the floor with a small smirk of amusement.

Bucky sighed, giving them both a look, before he headed up the stairs. He was annoyed out of principle, but really there was nothing he wanted to do more right then than spend some time out in the sun. 

Later, holding a trug of copper and wood and using the prosthetic to gently squeeze against the golden-red surface of his next targeted peach, Bucky felt a fresh rush of fond irritation at the thought that Sam had probably known that. He plucked the fruit free, dropped it into the basket, and for the first time in days only distantly recalled the feel of bone crunching beneath his hand.


	6. Chapter 6

His eyes saw only blackness. His ears heard nothing but silence. His body had long since gone numb. Even the pain of his injuries had dimmed.

The panic and despair, however, remained excruciatingly vivid. 

He couldn’t scream. 

The only thing left to him was a thread. Sometimes faint, sometimes close, but he could always _sense_ it. It was the only stimulus available to him besides his racing, gibbering thoughts, and his desperate and useless gathering of the dregs of his faded magic.

But it was not the only thing for long. At some point, a voice came.

It seemed to rumble all around him where there should have been only endless quiet. In the moments before his mind caught up he wondered if it had finally permanently broken beyond all sense.

But he had enough of his faculties to eventually understand quite clearly what exactly this was, and thus feel the full effect of the dread that it inspired.

“Well, well,” said the voice - familiar, terrifying, and laced with satisfaction. “Still alive. Just as I intended.”

He felt the thread strengthen with the words, brightening like a beacon. The possibility of hope only made his panic worse, because he knew beyond all certainty that this was no herald of mercy. 

He tried to follow it, heaving at everything he had to give, every spell he could fight to weave. In the choke of spasming lungs he realized that it would not be enough.

He couldn’t scream.

“I can feel the stone calling to you now. You made quite the impression upon it. But even one of the sources of the universe could not avoid its destiny.”

Another burst to bring him closer, and it felt like his very atoms were breaking with the strain. He almost wished they would.

“Your struggle is pointless. Just as every other struggle that came against me was pointless. You will fade. Lost, and unremembered by those who still live.”

He tried to fight through the roaring ache within him, but he had nothing left. He would have to wait for more magic to regather. But he knew his time was limited and he didn’t - he _couldn’t_ -

“They tried, you know. To bring their armies to bear against mine. Some of them were quite impressive. The true Asgardian, your brother and sovereign that you so gallantly sacrificed yourself to save, even found a formidable weapon with which to face me himself. He might have killed me if he’d aimed for the head. I thought his cry of despair as he failed for the final time was the sweetest music.”

_No. No. No._

_Please, no._

“I have one last gift to give you, even if you are undeserving of it. I will remove what you seek, and every last trace of it that remains upon me, so that you may at last give in. I hope you find rest. Know that I will be enjoying my own.”

The thread snapped.

He was adrift.

He couldn’t scream.

\-----------

“Loki’s still out,” Steve announced as he came up from the basement.

“Good, cause you’re due for a break,” Sam said, indicating the fully set dining table and the heaping bowls of pasta, salad, and bread at its center. He didn’t miss Bucky sending the basement door a few looks of agitation as he finished setting the table. “Maybe you guys should look into a baby monitor.”

Bucky gave Sam an exasperated glance as he put down the last of the silverware and took his seat - pointedly with his back to the basement. He’d been exiled from the kitchen for a couple hours after all the prep work had been done, which had been maddening as the scents of everything being made had filled the house and stoked his hunger. Hell if he was waiting any longer.

Sam was a damn good cook.

Bucky liked to think he had a good grasp of making meals - following recipes was easy enough, and he’d been doing it consistently because measuring the ratios of ingredients and the cooking times was almost as soothing as going outside to tend to the garden. Not to mention that getting deliveries to his actual address or going for extended ventures out in public to a restaurant remained all things he really wanted to avoid. 

He was a supersoldier with a vibranium arm. He could make the most precise of movements and recall and follow instructions to the letter. He could even improvise when it was needed.

But there was some kind of goddamn trick Sam was able to do where, as soon as Bucky even tried anything the man had cooked, his entire body wanted to _shudder_ with how good it was. Like it wasn’t something that should even be possible.

It almost irritated him. The fact that Sam was well aware of just how good he was didn’t help.

“You know, no one’s stopping you from chewing your food,” Sam remarked less than a minute into dinner.

Bucky paused with his fork in his mouth. At his side, Steve did the exact same thing. 

Sam’s lips curled smugly as he watched them both.

Bucky let his utensil clink back into his bowl. “It’s just tomato sauce,” he said, still confused about the way his taste buds were reacting. 

“It’s really good, Sam,” Steve said, digging right back in. 

“I might have won a contest or two in my day,” Sam said with a shrug. “Superhero gig’s leaving me a little rusty, but fresh ingredients help a lot.” 

Bucky belatedly realized that was something of a compliment aimed at him. Hesitantly, he took another bite, and almost cursed out loud when it turned out it was just as good as it had been twenty seconds earlier. 

Sam raised his eyebrows. “It’s pasta, Barnes, not a combat scenario. You don’t need to give your all at not giving in to things when they feel good. Just maybe don’t inhale it.”

Bucky gave Sam a dry look, then intentionally overloaded his fork and defiantly took the biggest damned bite he could manage. 

Sam stared him down blandly. “I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.” 

Bucky chewed and swallowed and tried to keep his expression flat to make it look like he _wasn’t_ carefully focused on not accidentally choking himself to death. By the time he was done with his first serving, Steve and Sam were engaged in small talk about the support group Steve had been running, and he took the opportunity of their distraction to help himself to another two servings. At this rate he was going to end up as big as he’d been while hiding out in Romania, back when he was off HYDRA’s strict feeding regime and trying to keep himself as fit as possible to be ready for when they came for him. 

“They’re covering for me until I’m done here,” Steve said. 

Sam looked interested. “You still think you’ll be going back?”

“I think so,” Steve said with a nod. “If they’ll have me. They’ve been pretty forgiving whenever I take extended leaves.”

“There’s a lot of people out there that would love to get some personal sage words from Steve Rogers,” Sam said encouragingly. “Also, from what I’ve heard, whenever you did take breaks during those years we were gone it was generally of the world-saving variety.”

Steve’s smile got a little tighter. Bucky didn’t say anything, but he could tell Sam noticed it, too.

“Seems like you’re really working some stuff out,” Sam went on. “You know, you never told me what happened when you time traveled to replace the stones. You were back less than two minutes later, but it seemed like it had been a lot longer for you.”

Steve shrugged, still a little stiff. “I took a little break,” he said, and quirked an eyebrow. “Not to save the world.”

Sam stared at him for a long moment. “Did it make you happy?”

Steve waited a beat. “I think I’m still trying to figure that out,” he admitted.

“That wasn’t a no,” Sam said with a small, positive smile. 

“No,” Steve said, the tightness loosening from his face. “I guess it wasn’t.”

Sam looked towards Bucky and the nearly-empty serving bowl, and then did a double take. “Hell, Buck. Did you even leave room for dessert?”

Bucky frowned, still chewing. “There’s dessert?”

\-----------

After the meal, Bucky was a little too full to be comfortable, but if anyone asked him, he’d stubbornly maintain that it was worth it.

He _was_ feeling a little more equipped to mentally deal with the stress of the recovering alien in his basement. Maybe the fact that he let himself go that far at dinner was a sign that he was starting to relax about the situation.

Maybe. If he didn’t think too hard on it and ruin everything before he was even back down in the basement.

At the sink, Steve was arms deep in a mountain of dishes and cookware and handing them off to Sam to be wiped off and placed in the drying rack. Bucky didn’t even know what half of the gadgets in his kitchen were yet, having moved in with it fully stocked. Every time he thought about going and reading an instruction pamphlet or two, a stirring of guilt would sap his interest. He tended to keep to the most basic appliances.

Sam knew, though, and it almost looked like he’d gone through and used them all in the course of one afternoon. He’d even half-stocked the dishwasher that Bucky never bothered to use.

“There’s enough leftovers to last for a few days,” Sam said, indicating the stack of packed tupperwares on the counter. “And I stocked your chest freezer with a few odds and ends. None of it’s labeled, but as long as you can handle a basic thaw and reheat process I guarantee you’ll be satisfied.” He opened up the fridge and pulled out a bottle filled with a pale opaque liquid. “And this is for your other guest. At this point he needs something with a bit more substance to it.”

“Right,” Bucky said, reaching out to take the bottle. Loki had been too distracted to take anything in on his last break into consciousness, so if he woke up during Bucky’s watch he would have to make sure he didn’t get sidetracked.

“I’m gonna turn in for some shuteye,” Sam said. He shook his head. “You know, I thought today was gonna be a lot more crazy than it actually ended up being. I guess ninety nine percent of the time sleeping wasn’t an exaggeration.” He pointed at Bucky. “Just to let you know, you’re gonna be going blackberry hunting for me for breakfast,” he warned, before heading off to the second guest bedroom. 

Bucky called irritably after him. “When do you want to start - two AM?”

Sam shot him a smirk before shutting the door behind him.

Steve was putting the tupperwares with cooled food in the fridge. “You know, I can take this watch if you want,” he said. 

“No,” Bucky said, looking down at the bottle in his hand. “I got it.”

Steve watched him for a minute. “This doesn’t have to be your problem, Buck.”

“I know,” Bucky said, knowing this was only coming up at all because Sam had dragged it out into the open earlier that day, and that it wasn’t at all as simple as Steve was making it seem. “But it’s the best plan. Sam’s right - he’s just messed up right now. He’ll get better eventually, and then he’ll be gone.”

Steve was staring at Bucky with a furrowed brow, and Bucky felt his heart do a weird skip as he wondered what the hell he’d just said to earn that look. 

“I’m gonna head down,” he announced, feeling a little like a coward. He waved the bottle in his hand in indication. “Get this put away before I’m tempted to try it and end up drinking the whole damn thing myself.”

He headed back to the basement, pausing midway down the stairs and exhaling heavily to collect himself. Then he looked up, stretching his senses. Sometimes when Loki was about to wake up, the hairs on the back of Bucky’s neck went stiff and threatened to send a shiver down his back. It had gotten better the more lucid Loki’d become, had been almost nonexistent by the time Sam had showed up. But Bucky still instinctively searched for it.

Whenever it happened it almost felt like a ghost was in the basement with him, trying to push him back up the stairs, telling him he was unwanted. 

He felt it the strongest in his prosthetic - like a joint that ached before the rain. He wasn’t sure if he would have been able to separate from his normal tension if he didn’t have state of the art Wakandan technology attached to his body. If Steve had felt anything like it himself, he hadn’t mentioned it. But if Steve had felt it, he probably just would have powered through it.

It wasn’t there, now, so Bucky took that as a good sign and wandered over to the mini fridge that sat at the wall of the rec room, storing the smoothie Sam had made.

He peered in at Loki only after that. He was asleep, still with those raw breaths shaking his chest. He’d moved out of the position Steve had placed him, and was now back to curling up in the center of the blankets. His hair was becoming a worsening snarled mess as the days progressed, even though he’d barely moved in all that time. 

Bucky retreated back to the exercise bench and tied his own hair up before he started a workout, trying to keep his good mood and not think too hard on the conversation he and Loki’d had the last time they were alone together.

_Don’t give me a reason, and it won’t be a problem._

_And what would constitute a reason,_ Loki had said testingly, like a challenge. _I have only your word, belied by your actions. How short is your fuse?_

 _Not as short as you think,_ Bucky had responded, even if he’d felt a little like something inside of him was vibrating the longer Loki had made eye contact. He hadn’t been able to completely discount it from being an external influence. 

He managed to just keep his thoughts rotating around that without going any deeper, but it was still enough he clenched his teeth and set down the weights with a little too much intensity once he was done. He peered over at the bathroom, checking that Loki hadn’t stirred at the noise. He hadn’t, even if it looked like he was starting to curl up even tighter than he’d been earlier. 

It was quiet upstairs, too. Sam and Steve had probably gone to bed. 

Bucky just rested on the bench for a while, sitting in the silence, chasing the fading edges of the peace that had settled over him earlier in the day in an attempt to make them hang around longer.

It worked, for a little while. 

Until he felt that tingle start up in his arm. Breathing out, he looked towards Loki, and saw that he was still unmoving. But there was definitely… _something_ , wafting through the air, coming from the bathroom.

It wasn’t peaceful like the last couple of times he’d come back to consciousness. It was that tingle of pressure, like a ring in his ears he couldn’t hear if he focused too hard on it.

Could Loki tell that Bucky was the only one down there with him, even unconscious? Or was it just a coincidence?

Maybe Sam was right and he was just being overly paranoid.

He got up from the exercise bench, forcing himself to go towards that feeling. Loki was still down on the floor but his brow was beginning to get an unhappy cast. He was being slow about it this time, but Bucky was pretty sure he was about to wake up. 

He backed away and moved to the mini fridge to grab the smoothie, gearing himself up for the interaction.

And that was when the basement walls started shaking.

\-----------

Endless dark. Only endless dark.

But then - the thread.

_It came back._

A call of light he could barely remember. It had been there once. Or had it?

He fell from consciousness, again and again and again, but each time he woke it was still there.

And when it faded - disappeared from existence - it had the mercy to remain in the faintest of traces. Not the beacon, but the fingerprints of its power. It was cast among several sources, all originating from a single direction.

He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t think. Still he fought, with the wretched spasming instinct of the eternally dying. He clawed himself into consciousness and he wrenched at the power within himself until there was nearly nothing left, and even then he kept straining and pulling because _what more did he have to lose._

\-----------

“What the fuck?”

Bucky’s voice was swallowed completely by the rumbling roar of the basement walls. 

It wasn’t just a gentle ghost but a full blown violent poltergeist, shattering the bathroom mirror and throwing back anything that wasn’t pinned down - the mini fridge, the card table, his weights. Bucky barely leapt in time to avoid getting slammed with the exercise bench, staring in absolute bafflement as it embedded itself in the wall, every muscle poised as an invisible cyclone moved around him. 

The basement door crashed open, and Bucky would have thought that was another reaction to whatever was happening but then Sam was there, at his side, lifting the shield and bracing it above them just as all of the bulbs in the basement exploded simultaneously, casting it into darkness.

The house stopped shaking immediately. The quiet was all the more dramatic from the sudden shut off of the noise.

Bucky panted, still in fight or flight mode, waiting tensely for it to start up again. “What the hell was _that?_ ”

“Kind of hoped you would tell me,” Sam said, just as tense. Bucky felt rather than saw as he brought the shield down in front of himself.

Bucky could hear Sam slowly enter the bathroom, boots crunching over broken glass. A beam of light appeared suddenly - he had turned on the flashlight function of his phone. When it went to the pile of blankets on the floor, Bucky’s lungs seized as he saw that they were completely empty. An indentation at their center was the only sign left of the body that had been resting there.

He cursed himself for letting his guard down, turning to the main basement even though the dark made it almost impossible to see. “Where the hell did he go?”

In answer, the screams started up, loud and shrill. They were coming down from the main part of the house, originating in the direction of the guest bedrooms.

“Steve,” Bucky and Sam said at the same time, and then they both bolted for the stairs.


	7. Chapter 7

Steve hadn’t been asleep yet when it happened, which meant that he was fully awake and present for the entire sequence of events as everything unfolded.

First, there was the vague and distant rumble, faint but strange enough to bring a furrow to his brow. Then the bed beneath him began to rock in a gentle but insistent rhythm. _Earthquake,_ was his next thought - but the tremors kept worsening, swelling until his Wakandan arm shields fell over from where they’d been propped up on the dresser across the room. 

He sat up at that point, instincts starting to kick in, when two things happened at once: the lightbulb on the far wall burst apart in a sharp crash that sent glass stinging across his skin, and in the bright flash that came before the complete dark he saw Loki appear out of thin air next to him on the bed. 

Then Loki’s entire body jerked in a sharp spasm, and he started screaming.

It was shrill in Steve’s ears, the increased volume a testament to how badly damaged Loki’s larynx had been the last time he’d cried out. 

Steve instinctively reached out blindly and came in contact with a bony shoulder. At the touch, Loki jolted, his voice cutting off into a gasp-whimper as his body drew taut. A chilled and trembling hand came up and clutched against Steve’s wrist, squeezing down with a startling frailness.

“Loki,” Steve said, and felt the flinch beneath his palm. Loki dropped his hand, body shifting like he was trying his hardest to sink into the bed, and Steve reluctantly moved his hand off him. “Are you hurt? What’s happening?” 

The noise that followed those questions was wordless, low, and full of despair. It sent an ache swirling in Steve’s gut. The house itself had gone still, but the shaking that came from Loki was violent enough to carry through the mattress between them. 

Steve looked around - or tried to. The only concrete information Loki had given them about what would help him had been about wanting the light, and the entire room had been cast into blackness. Steve couldn’t even make out the silhouette of his body, but he could clearly hear Loki taking in air in rough spurts in the dark. Panicking.

He moved to his knees, reaching towards the nightstand to grope for his phone. His hand only met a smooth, empty surface. He gave an inward curse as he realized it must have fallen.

He was about to risk treading on broken glass to look for it on the ground when rapid footsteps approached and the bedroom door was all but slammed open.

Sam and Bucky rushed in - the hallway beyond was dark, but the light of Sam’s phone was on and beaming enough to brighten a good portion of the guest room.

“Shit,” Bucky said, eyes glued to the scene - Steve, face decorated with a few reddened cuts, with Loki at his side contorted into a tangle of thin, trembling limbs. “What the fuck happened?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said, looking down at Loki, who was clutching at fistfuls of the sheets beneath him. “He just appeared.”

Bucky flicked his eyes to Steve’s face. “In your bed?”

Steve straightened, peering back into the hallway. “Is every light in the house out?”

“As far as we can tell,” Sam said, slowly lowering his shield. “Not everything was destroyed, but the basement’s pretty trashed and the power’s off. I got this, though.” Sam waved the phone in indication. “Barnes’s cell is toast. What’s yours looking like?”

Steve indicated the nightstand, and with the help of Sam angling the light, carefully found his phone had been thrown across the room and was laying cracked open on the floor. 

“Well, good thing I’m the only person with places to be,” Sam said grimly. “Although I’m kind of wishing I’d taken the time to put on shoes before rushing in and saving Barnes from nothing.”

“My hero,” Bucky said absently.

Loki had gone quieter now that Steve wasn’t touching him, but he was blinking rapidly and his shivering hadn’t gotten any less pronounced. He’d been staring up into the light of Sam’s phone since it had arrived, his eyes visibly watering. When Sam got closer Loki started to move his arms like he was going to try to crawl towards it.

“Don’t let him fall,” Bucky blurted, then clamped his lips shut like he hadn’t meant to say that.

Steve tried to put the slightest pressure he could manage in keeping Loki where he was, but Loki’s eyes immediately rounded and his gasps took on a more panicked edge.

“Sam,” Steve said, trying to balance between keeping Loki in place without actively restraining him. “Bring the light over.”

Sam did, nervously checking for shards of broken glass. Loki watched him approach with a wild, riveted gaze. When the phone got close enough Loki bared his teeth and darted out his hand to grab at it - Sam let it go immediately like he’d been burned. Bucky surged forward at the action with clenched fists, but Sam quickly held his arm out to keep him back.

“Okay,” Sam said, backing off, and gently pushing Bucky to back off with him. “I guess you’re borrowing that.”

Loki only shuddered in response, holding the phone with the light pointed upwards, breaths coming stiltedly - though now it seemed like he was making the effort to calm himself. Steve cautiously leaned back, giving him a bit more space and time to regain his composure. 

Bucky exhaled unhappily and looked around the room, even though most of it was still in shadow. “What the hell was up in _here_ that you were looking for?”

Loki dragged his eyes up from the light and stared at Bucky with a distant horror on his face. His skin was still twitching, and he didn’t look like he was entirely lucid just yet. 

“You jumped for a reason,” Bucky insisted, voice tight, almost accusing. “Why did you show up in my garden? What’s in my house that you want?”

A noise came from Loki, harsh and breathless, an awful cross between a laugh and a sob. It disappeared quickly, and was followed by a rough and audible swallow. 

“Captain,” Loki said after a moment, the word tremulous and hoarse. 

Steve straightened, beyond ready to be pointed in the right direction of what he could do to help. “What is it?”

Tremors wracked Loki; the next word came like it was being forced from his throat. “Thanos.”

Steve waited for more, but Loki didn’t seem to be able to bring himself to say anything else. “What about him?”

Loki’s breaths were escalating again. “What…was his fate?”

There was a desperation in Loki’s voice that made Steve think that giving a simpler answer to that question would be the better choice. “He’s dead.”

Loki’s fingers tightened over Sam’s phone, careful to not block any light. “How?”

“Depends on which one you’re asking about,” Bucky muttered under his breath.

Steve gave Bucky a look. “It’s a little complicated,” he said. 

Loki clenched his teeth. “ _How?_ ”

Steve sighed; it looked like the simple answer hadn’t been the best idea after all. “After he got all the Infinity Stones and snapped his fingers, he retreated to an isolated planet. We found him alone. He’d destroyed the stones so we wouldn’t be able to use them ourselves. Thor beheaded him.” 

Steve could still remember the echo of that failure, and the tightness in his throat on the ride back to Earth, along with the numbness that had followed. The end of a war that they’d thought they’d been prepared to fight. 

Loki blinked rapidly, brow crinkling like he was taking the time to absorb the information. “And...then?”

Then…the miracles, one after another, which Steve found a lot easier to recount. “We traveled in time to get the stones to bring everyone back. A past version of Thanos managed to follow us into the future. We beat him by using the stones.”

“He’s erased from existence,” Sam added for emphasis. “Permanently.”

“And Thor lives,” Loki said, that edge to his voice still sharp.

“Thor’s alive,” Steve confirmed. “Just not on Earth.”

Loki’s face crumpled and he took a huge, gulping breath, like a drowning man who’d just reached air. “Th-thank you,” he said, chest hitching with sobbing breaths. “I - thank you.”

He turned his face partially into the bedspread, keeping one eye on the light. His breathing was finally beginning to transition from near-hyperventilation back to the baseline ragged quality that normally plagued it.

They watched him as he recovered. Bucky, especially, stared hard at Loki, but he didn’t demand any answers to his earlier questions. Instead, he moved forward until he was next to Sam, then pressed a bottle he’d been holding into his hand.

“I’m gonna go try to figure out the power,” Bucky announced, and then left.

Sam sighed, eyes going to Loki. “Looks like you’re coming down off of whatever that was,” he observed. “So what are the odds we just happened to have a decent magnitude earthquake at the exact same time you moved yourself up here?” He looked between Loki and Steve like he was waiting for an answer, then frowned more deeply when none came. “Didn’t think so.”

Loki, still holding Sam’s phone like it was a lifeline, twitched his eyebrows in confusion. “Power,” he said questioningly, repeating the last word to Bucky’s sentence.

“That was a hell of a panic attack,” Sam explained. “It felt like you were trying to take the entire house down. Might of caused a surge, or - whatever else whatever you do can cause.” 

Loki blinked, his expression starting to go blank. While Steve didn’t like that, it meant that Loki was back with them enough that he could manage to project that mask.

“It’s all right,” Steve said, and the corner of Loki’s eye twitched. “It was an accident, right?”

Though Bucky had spoken like he’d thought Loki had known exactly what he was doing, Steve thought otherwise. He really didn’t think Loki would intentionally inflict that kind of suffering on himself.

Loki blinked again, and didn’t answer. It looked like he was trying to lock down hard in the aftermath of his emotions.

“Do you mind if I come forward?” Sam asked. He indicated the bottle, his hands out where Loki could see them. “I’d like to give this to you.”

Loki changed the angle of the light, directing it slightly towards Sam. “What is it?” Despite his flat gaze, his voice still trembled at the edges.

“A smoothie,” Sam said, giving the bottle a brief shake in indication. “Peaches, banana, coconut water, and yogurt. Nothing dangerous.”

Loki’s wasted throat worked. He looked between the drink and Sam’s face. He’d been, Steve noticed, very careful about not looking back at him at all since he’d appeared on the bed.

“I can hold the phone for you if you want to take it,” Steve offered. 

Loki immediately sucked in a breath and pulled the phone in closer to his chest, casting a stretched shadow of his profile looming over them on the wall. “I am afraid I must...decline,” he grated out.

“Okay,” Sam said, genuinely sounding like he thought that was a totally acceptable answer. “But you’re really missing out. Barnes had a strict fertilizer schedule for the tree that busted out these peaches. Got a soil meter and everything.”

Loki just stared at Sam through narrowed eyes, nostrils flaring as he sucked in air. The sound of his breathing almost covered up the gurgle that came from his stomach.

“You must be thirsty,” Steve said. “You missed taking anything in when you were awake earlier.”

Loki made a sharp sound in response, brittle and sardonic. “I spent years dying of thirst,” he said, with a fair amount of bitterness. “If I am even capable of dying from it at all.”

Something in Loki’s gaze had begun to thaw, but for whatever reason, he still couldn’t bring himself to accept the help. He didn’t want to risk being in the dark, and he didn’t trust Steve to keep the light on him.

Steve wasn’t sure how to convince him.

Luckily, a clicking noise came at that point, and then the hallway light turned on. Loki jerked, his head swiveling towards it, mouth parting as he stared.

“Looks like Barnes got things up and running,” Sam said, sounding as relieved as Steve felt.

“We can move into the living room,” Steve said to Loki. “It’ll be brighter in there.”

Loki’s eyes fluttered, not quite shutting. Then, limbs unsteady, he started to try to press himself up, carefully angling the phone to keep its light on his face. When Steve went to help he let him, if reluctantly, mouth clamping as his breath caught. He managed to get himself into a sitting position that way, and stared longingly at the beams of light in the hallway.

Steve got one of Loki’s arms around his shoulders. Sam used his shield to hastily brush aside some of the glass fragments on the floor, then took the other side. He let Loki keep a hold on his phone while they moved him, even if it wasn’t doing much to help illuminate where it was positioned now.

They walked slowly, supporting Loki as carefully as they could. He still winced and made a few soft grunting noises on the way to the couch, then grimaced when he was finally lowered onto the cushions, propped up against the back. He panted like he’d just run a marathon instead of taking a gentle assisted walk down a hallway.

Loki was calming down, though. Calming down or just reaching the end limits of his energy. His head was starting to dip back, and he pressed his tongue against chapped lips, eyes half-lidded.

Steve grimly noted the bruises forming along the insides of Loki’s arms where most of his weight had pressed on them. More work for his body to recover from.

“You’ve got some new injuries,” Steve pointed out. “Anything serious?”

Loki stared at Steve without responding for several seconds, brow knitting together. Eventually, he gave a slight shake of his head. Now that he was partially upright it made it even more obvious just how much he was swimming in Bucky’s clothes.

“Here,” Sam said, twisting the cap off the bottle and holding it out. “Trade you for my phone back.”

Loki stared wearily at the offering, his chin dipping down to his chest. He didn’t take long to agree to the exchange, extending a thin arm with Sam’s phone. He clutched solemnly at the bottle that was handed to him, managing not to drop it even if his arm shook from the weight.

He tentatively brought the bottle to his lips. When he took the first mouthful, the response wasn’t subtle like it had been with the last drink - this time, Loki out and out _moaned_ , his eyes taking on a bright sheen.

Sam was frowning in concern at the response. “Does it hurt that bad to drink?”

“No,” Steve said, that ache beginning to reform in his chest and drop down to his toes. “I don’t think it’s that.”

Loki took a second mouthful, and the first of the tears broke free to run down his cheeks.

 _I spent years dying of thirst_ rang in Steve’s head like a terrible echo, raising a sick feeling in his stomach.

Loki stayed engrossed in the bottle, his full concentration on taking slow but steady sips. He didn’t look up again until the front door opened. Bucky entered, cool air wafting in behind him, then came to a stop as he saw them all gathered in the living room, letting the door slowly fall shut. 

He locked eyes with Loki. Loki looked back, his own body unmoving but for the strain of his breathing.

“The good news is he’s not trying to kill us,” Sam said into the awkward silence.

Steve took in the difference in the tension that rose between Loki and Bucky with a frown. Eventually, Loki seemed to think drinking held more of a draw than paying any mind to Bucky, and brought the bottle back to his lips again. He was still openly weeping, losing moisture even as he took it in.

A hard line began to form on Bucky’s forehead as he watched.

“Don’t judge,” Sam said, drawing Bucky’s attention. “You looked like _you_ were about to cry earlier after you tried that cobbler.”

Bucky rolled his eyes, finally breaking out of the stillness of his defensive stance as he took a few steps further into the living room. There was a cardboard box under his arm that he shifted into his hand.

“New light bulbs?” Steve asked.

“Yeah,” Bucky confirmed, his eyes going back to Loki. “He hasn’t passed out again yet.”

Loki shuddered, lowering the drink to his lap. His gaze darted to Bucky momentarily, then to Steve and Sam, before he focused back on the half empty bottle with an air of resignation. He didn’t look happy about being surrounded, but he at least wasn’t shaking in terror anymore.

And he was still awake.

Loki licked his lips, his voice coming out low and rough. “I assume you have questions.”


	8. Chapter 8

Loki looked worn and pale against the rustic brown cushions of Bucky’s couch. He probably wanted nothing more than to be left alone to rest and better focus on the smoothie Sam had made for him.

But he was offering answers. And whether he felt compelled because he actually wanted the information out in the open, or he thought he had to present something to pacify them, it took Steve some effort to have restraint and not just dive right into prising the situation apart at the first chance he’d been given. 

“You might say that,” he said dryly, raising his eyebrows. “But if you have limited energy, spending it on getting fuel is probably the better way to go at this point.”

“I can devote my attention to both,” Loki said, with a confidence that all but abandoned him in the next few seconds. He shrank back, head bowing as he contemplated the mottled bruises on his forearms. “But I cannot promise an answer to everything.”

“Why not?” Bucky asked - almost demanded. He was watching Loki with a look that could freeze fire.

Loki huffed out a breath, his reddened eyes rising to stare at nothing. “Because it is very likely that I will not want to answer.” 

He drank again, his hollow gaze still aimed forward. A single shudder ran through him, then subsided.

Steve considered the situation. He would have thought the energy Loki had expended teleporting into the guest room would have left him too weakened to interact, but if anything, he seemed _more_ alert than he had before - and he was willing to talk to them. His proposition sounded a lot more straightforward than anything he’d said the last time the Avengers had encountered him, too. 

Even if, in his current condition, Steve would have been surprised if he’d been able to put much effort into anything more than straightforward. 

He looked towards Sam, who shrugged, then Bucky, who scowled, adjusting the box of lightbulbs in his grip. Loki just kept staring into the middle distance, a thrum intermittently running through his thin frame.

Steve guessed there wasn’t much point in refusing when Loki was volunteering.

“What happened when you shifted,” he said, “with the power surge and the electronics breaking - is that something we can expect again?”

Loki’s brow furrowed. He took his time with answering, and avoided direct eye contact. “I do not know,” he eventually said, voice flat. “I did not wake until I was in the dark.”

“So it was all involuntary,” Sam said, pointedly side eyeing Bucky. Bucky stared back for a few seconds, then sighed, finally losing some of the harsh edges to his expression.

“It was not a calculated attack,” Loki said. He sounded like he fully expected them not to believe him.

“It’s all right,” Steve said. “It takes a little more than that to endanger us.” He couldn’t help the humor that seeped into his voice. “You’d know that firsthand.”

Loki didn’t quite relax at the joke. He darted a cautious gaze between the three of them, carefully balancing the smoothie against his thigh. He didn’t say anything else; he was just waiting.

“Let’s go back a little,” Steve said, keeping his voice calm and encouraging. “Thor told us you died.”

“Twice,” Sam added. “Although I wasn’t in this realm of existence to hear about the second time myself.”

Loki picked at his thumb with the fingers of his opposite hand. “That particular event would actually have been the third of such occurrences,” he corrected. 

Steve stared in confusion, wracking his brain before he remembered. “You’re talking about before the invasion,” Steve said. “When you fell from Asgard.”

“The first,” Loki confirmed, his brow twitching up. He took a moment to take another drink; his arm was unsteady, and he had to concentrate to level the bottle. He bared his teeth as he dropped his arm back down, giving a harsh exhale of exertion before he continued. “Thor believed I was dead at that point, as well.”

Three times. Which meant they were one perceived death ahead of Steve and Bucky.

Not that Steve wanted the universe to give them a tie.

“So the third time,” Steve said, shouldering past those memories before they could distract him. “You were alive.”

“Yes,” Loki said, his eyes dilating and his daze going distant. 

He didn’t volunteer any details. More worryingly, what little color that had come back to his face was quickly seeping out of it.

Steve looked towards Sam, who shook his head minutely, just as at a loss. 

It was Bucky who spoke up. “Thanos broke your neck,” he said, drawing sharp looks from them all. 

Loki gave a twitch of a blink, then audibly swallowed in discomfort. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Did Thor mention that as well?” 

“No,” Bucky said. “It was broken when you showed up in my garden.”

Sam looked mildly disturbed at the exchange. “Barnes, I know it’s hard to remember because we’d been dust for a lot of that time, but that whole thing happened five years ago.”

“The marks were the same size as the Gauntlet,” Bucky insisted.

Sam frowned, tilting his head. “Why would that even be something you would notice?”

Bucky stiffened, the fingers of his metal hand curling against the box he was holding. His response was cagey. “Because that’s what it was.”

Loki’s breaths stuttered in his lungs. “Yes,” he breathed more than said. 

Bucky met Loki’s eyes, and Steve got the sense there was some kind of painful understanding passing between them. He wasn’t sure what to think of it. There had been tension between Loki and Bucky for a while, even when Loki had been unconscious. Whatever was happening now seemed different, but it didn’t exactly make Steve feel any better.

“You’re here, now,” he said to Loki, trying to bring him back from that hollow-eyed stare. “You survived.”

A bitter twist contorted Loki’s lips. “My survival was intended. Or, at the very least, viewed as an acceptable outcome.” He wasn’t shutting down, but he still spoke vacantly, like he was holding the words at a distance from himself. “I am quite hard to kill, you see. Thanos had considerable knowledge of this when I was offered an army to retrieve the Tesseract.

It sounded like there was more to that statement. Back in 2012 they hadn’t delved into it, but they hadn’t really known who was pulling Loki’s strings. Or why.

“You had one of the stones,” Bucky said. He sounded more confused than angry. “You could have used it. Why the hell would you give it up?”

For the first time since waking up in the dark, Loki closed his eyes and let them stay that way. He looked like he was clinging to a neutral expression by the frailest thread. “Because he would have killed Thor.”

He didn’t open his eyes again, so he didn’t see their reactions. His body had gone still again, like it had when Bucky had come back inside the house - like prey under the sight of a predator. “I knew that if I offered...Thanos thought himself above trickery and manipulation, but he did precisely what I meant for him to do.” His hands were white-knuckled around the smoothie bottle. 

“Thor was rescued,” Steve prompted, and was rewarded with Loki’s eyes blinking back open. “The ship you were on was destroyed, and he was picked up out of space.”

Loki stared at Steve like he was waiting to make sure there wasn’t a trick at the end of that statement. “He was found.”

“By a group of people who called themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy,” Sam said. Something sad sparked in his gaze. “No one found you.”

Loki exhaled shakily, his muscle tension returning. “Why would anyone search for a corpse?”

“You weren’t a corpse,” Steve said, and in his periphery saw Bucky send him a severe look. 

“No,” Loki said, voice raw and body thrumming. “But as you’ve observed, I make a convincing likeness. Whether I will it or not.”

Right.

Steve remembered waiting patiently as the minutes stretched for a heartbeat to stir beneath frigid flesh. In the initial examination of Loki’s body in the garden, it hadn’t taken long at all for Steve to feel his pulse. If he’d put his fingers to Loki’s throat at the wrong moment, he might have missed it. If it had taken too long to feel it then, he probably really would have written him off as deceased. 

Loki hadn’t been breathing. Even after they’d known he was alive, he hadn’t looked alive.

Steve didn’t bother to dwell on it, just as he didn’t bother to dwell on what would have happened if Loki had ended up anywhere else. He was here. And after what had just happened with his sudden appearance in the guest room, Steve was starting to come around to Bucky’s earlier belief that it hadn’t been simple luck.

“So you made your way to Earth somehow,” Steve said. The lack of Loki’s immediate denial to that statement further cemented the truth of it. “We thought it was a random occurrence.”

Loki didn’t quite smile. “You thought I had come to you purely by accident, by happenstance - out of all beings in the cosmos, because simple fate willed it so.” His voice sounded too tired to be contemptuous. “And here I thought Stark was the most self-centered Avenger.”

Steve watched Loki in interest. “So it _was_ intentional.”

“To a point,” Loki said. “I could not...I could not sense…” He trailed off. The bottle fell out of his hand and thudded against the floor, sending droplets of his smoothie spraying out. “There was nothing,” he finished, voice going faint. “Nothing.”

“Loki,” Steve said, intrigue quickly transitioning to concern.

Loki shook like a dog sloughing off water, blinking. He stared into the living room light and then raised trembling hands into his hair, clenching down. 

“Tell me again,” he demanded, voice fraying at the edges. His chest heaved as his breathing picked back up. “Tell me - Thanos-”

“He’s dead,” Steve quickly said.

“You were triumphant over his armies.”

“Every single soldier,” Sam confirmed.

“And Thor,” Loki gasped, still desperate. “What of Thor?”

“He fought with us,” Steve said. Loki’s terror was still going strong, so he added, “We took down Thanos together.”

“Steve lifted his hammer,” Bucky broke in.

That was what finally made Loki freeze, his chest going still like he’d forgotten how to breathe. He restarted quickly, dropping his hands from his hair as he slowly turned his head to stare at Bucky through wide, tear-filled eyes. “What did you say?”

Bucky shrugged. “Steve carried the hammer and was fighting on the field summoning lightning like the God of Thunder.”

Loki turned his eyes upon Steve, expression chock full of a lot of things - but most of all, he just looked shocked. Enough to disrupt some of his considerable anxiety.

He wasn’t panicking anymore. 

Unfortunately, not two seconds later, he swayed where he sat. “Oh,” he said, and then his eyes rolled back.

Luckily, he’d been put far enough back against the couch that he just keeled over into an awkward slump on his side against the cushions instead of crashing to the floor. 

Sam heaved a deep sigh, turning to Bucky in disapproval. “You thought bragging about Steve’s accomplishments in the Battle for Earth was the right way to take that?”

“He responded, didn’t he?” Bucky shook his head. “God, I hate that name.”

“I think Captain Danvers would agree with you,” Sam said, reaching a hand up to rub wearily at the nape of his own neck. “And I can’t argue it doesn’t make us sound pretty damn egotistical.”

Steve moved forward while they talked, taking the opportunity of Loki’s loss of consciousness to gently check his body more thoroughly for anything of concern. He thought everything looked basically good, until he saw a troubling red patch peeking up from the waistband beneath Loki’s lower back. 

“Sam,” he said, interrupting their conversation. “Can you check Loki for me?”

Sam came over, giving the marks his own examination. “Looks like pressure injuries from sitting on the couch,” he said.

Behind them, Bucky pressed his lips together, turning away and stalking off towards the basement with quick steps.

“He’s only been on it for fifteen minutes,” Steve said, unable to help glancing back in the direction Bucky had gone.

“This doesn’t look too good,” Sam said, grimacing as he stretched down the neck of the shirt and found matching patches over Loki’s shoulder blades. “You had the right idea with keeping him moving when he was out. Whatever’s wrong with him, physical pressure is definitely a major concern.”

Steve looked at the bruises on Loki’s arms, which already looked like they were starting to visibly recede at the edges. “Guess we’re lucky he seems to heal fast.” 

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I really don’t want to have to be the one to break the news to Thor that his lost brother miraculously reappeared alive only to give himself a traumatic brain injury because we forgot the crib rails.”

Bucky came back into the living room again, carrying a small mountain of blankets. “Here,” he said, jerking his arms up in indication. “I think I got all the glass out.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “You think,” he repeated dubiously.

“I’m not interested in having him bleed out on the hardwood,” Bucky said, throwing a couple of the uppermost blankets over for Sam to catch and gazing at Steve expectantly.

Steve got his arms under Loki, cradling him half-propped up as Sam and Bucky went to work folding the blankets and set them neatly on top of each other on the floor. He kept checking the spots where his forearm was braced for any reddening skin.

“You’re sure you want him camped out on the floor of your living room,” Sam said to Bucky as he straightened back up.

“If he stays on the couch he’ll probably roll off and break his spine,” Bucky said, still crouched as he made some last minute adjustments to smooth down the edges of the folded blankets. “And even if we wanted to, now we know carrying him back down to the basement’s going to rough him up more than he already is. He was probably so fucked up when he first arrived that we didn’t even notice.”

Sam nodded in grim agreement. “Not to mention your basement currently looks like it tried its damndest to get carried to Oz without the rest of the house.”

Steve raised his head, at attention. “What happened to the basement?”

Sam answered. “The same thing that happened in your room, only scaled to the tenth power.”

“It’s fine,” Bucky assured, waving a hand dismissively. “I didn’t buy most of the stuff down there.”

Steve creased his brow. So there’d been more damage. He didn’t like the way Bucky admitted to it, half sounding like he thought the destruction was just his due. 

Steve gently got Loki off the couch and onto the pile of blankets, set now so the uppermost one was a solid brown comforter with a yellow and teal floral pattern stretching in a line down one side. 

Sam exhaled like they’d just completed a particularly arduous task. “So who wants to take bets on the next time he’ll wake up?”

“Hopefully not before I’m done putting the basement and the guest room back together,” Bucky said. He looked towards Sam. “I don’t have a landline.”

“Yeah, because you tore it out when you moved in,” Sam said, eyebrows raised. “Don’t worry, I’ll set up your replacement phones in the morning. But you’re wearing those Falcon sweatpants of yours all day tomorrow in exchange. It’s a gross oversight and you’ve been slacking on that.”

“Yes, sir,” Bucky said with a sarcastic salute. 

“Need any help with the cleanup?” Steve asked.

Bucky shook his head slightly, then seemed to change his mind. “I have some extra lanterns and flashlights in the garage. Might be a good idea to put a half dozen of those around Loki. Won’t help if he freaks out and breaks everything again, but…”

“I’ll get right on it,” Steve said. 

“Well, if no one’s gonna bother trying to sleep, I’ll put a pot of coffee on,” Sam said. He pointed at Bucky on his way into the kitchen. “Don’t forget about blackberry duty. Breakfast’s at 8 AM sharp.”

“Can’t wait,” Bucky said, a little too sincere for his usual backtalk. He looked towards Steve, eyes soft, then turned away and went back to the basement.

Steve gave Loki one last look before he headed for the garage, a greater certainty steadily filling him as he rooted around through boxes of supplies. They’d had a direct admission, now, that Loki had put his own life on the line to save Thor’s. A lost soldier of their desperate war, finally found again.

Even if it had turned out that Loki hadn’t come here for any particular reason, he was in need of help. And even if he was extremely reluctant for it, he was _looking_ for help.

Steve was determined to help him.

\----------

The world was warm.

Warm, and filled with scents both savory and sweet. Loki could hear low voices, and the distant singing of birds.

He stirred upon now familiar softness, his body singing with aches old and new. Breathing was still a struggle, as it had been when he was a gangly child and Thor would sit upon his chest to pin him down when he’d lost one of their scuffles. 

He opened his eyes, resigned to the fact that he was currently just as, if not more, gangly. But he’d had true sustenance for the first time in years, and his body reveled in it. His _magic_ reveled in it, no longer forced to exclusively pull in what limited energies it could manage from his withered body.

And Thor was alive. He remembered that fact with a jolt, feverish, clinging to the truth of it. Thanos had misled him, back when he’d taunted Loki about Thor’s defeat. He had cleverly spoken of Thor’s failure and not his death, but Loki was certain Thanos would have known full well what conclusions Loki would have drawn from such information. To fail in combat against the Mad Titan a _second time_ and still survive would have been unimaginable. 

But Thor had survived. And he’d survived to end Thanos’s life himself. 

Loki could confirm it again, if he wished. He suspected he often would, until such a day came that he could find his proof in laying eyes upon Thor himself. 

He could hear voices drifting over him, speaking quietly. The Captain, and the man who held his shield. It did not sound like the one with the metal arm was with them.

Loki moved his head, wanting to scan his surroundings before he decided on a plan of action, and nearly gasped as his vision was flooded with incredible light.

All thought fled but for one glorious, single realization: it was the _sun._ Golden rays cast over him in a beam, more radiant than any artificial brightness that could be created. He could see it clearly through a nearby window, set against a pale blue sky. 

It stung his eyes to look, but he did not care. His ribs suddenly felt as if they were made of uru, trapping his lungs. He fought to keep breathing, and to keep himself quiet as he stared. The conversation behind him remained soft and did not falter.

Loki found himself glad of their ignorance. It meant that he could give himself fully over to his weeping in peace.

The sun was there. And it was shining.


	9. Chapter 9

Loki was crying again.

Bucky had been on his way out of the house with the last of the trash bags filled with destroyed equipment from the basement when he saw the glint in his periphery. He paused with his grip still on the front door handle, belatedly turning his head to better check. 

Loki was on his back, unmoving except for his breaths. He wasn’t making any sound, and his eyes were closed. But his head was angled differently than it had been the last time Bucky had come up, and there was a subtle unevenness to his respirations compared to when he’d been unconscious.

All of those hints were overshadowed by the fact that his hollow cheeks were visibly wet beneath inflamed eyelids. The tear tracks were recent enough that they were shining in the sunlight beaming through the window.

Bucky glanced towards the dining room table. Sam and Steve were sitting together, almost shoulder to shoulder as Sam showed Steve the specs on possible phones that had a mild possibility of withstanding a resurgence of whatever Loki’s powers had done to theirs the night before. Steve was wearing one of Bucky’s henleys, his clothes having been put in the wash that morning. Sam was wearing another of his own t-shirts - he’d packed more than enough for a few nights, just in case he got called away on a mission without notice.

They didn’t seem to have noticed anything off.

Probably because Loki didn’t _want_ anyone to notice. 

Bucky looked back at the limp body on the blankets. It was possible that Loki had just gone back to sleep at that point. Bucky didn’t feel any strange feeling in the air around him, and the walls weren’t shaking. Loki was weak, and his last round of consciousness hadn’t been all that long ago.

Still, the signs of anguish were way too recent.

Bucky clenched his jaw and opened the front door, walking around the house towards the storage shed that held the garbage bin. A breeze tickled the hairs on the back of his neck as he opened it. The afternoons were still plenty hot, but it was getting darker earlier every day. He had a few projects he’d been meaning to get to before the fall, including a pile of concrete blocks he’d been intending to put down for the start of a foundation for a greenhouse. Now he was wondering if he’d just go the simpler route of putting some rebar into the ground and curve some PVC piping over the more tender plants during the colder season.

It wasn’t critical that he think about any of those plans this soon, but it made him feel better. 

He did a brief visual scan of the property - instinctive, and probably useless. He was pretty sure by this point that the only immediate problem was inside the house.

He went back in, not bothering to look towards the living room as he headed straight for the fridge. The blackberry smoothie Sam had whipped up for Loki was sitting in the door. It was a rich and inviting purple that made Bucky almost want to forget that he’d had plenty of his own breakfast already that morning.

He took the smoothie out. Steve looked up with his eyebrows raised while Sam gave him a half-suspicious look, phone still pressed to his ear. Bucky jerked his head in indication towards the living room. Steve turned his gaze towards the pile of blankets, somehow looking both sad and relieved at the same time. Sam gave a sharp nod of permission, going back to his conversation while Bucky made his way slowly back to Loki.

He watched readily for any tension or quick movements as he rounded the blanket pile, keeping himself within line of sight. He made sure not to step far enough to disrupt the light that was hitting Loki’s face, remembering how he’d screamed in the dark.

Loki didn’t so much as twitch.

Bucky sighed. He set the smoothie down within reach; the base of the container made an audible clack against the hardwood. Then he backed off a few steps.

Loki kept up the charade for a few seconds longer. His eyebrows were the first to break, pulling together in a soft frown, before his eyes fluttered open to look at the drink just inches from his face. 

There were still tears swimming in his eyes.

He stared up at Bucky next. Somehow the added signs of awareness didn’t do much to liven the deadness of his expression. He didn’t take any interest in the fact that Bucky was wearing sweat pants covered in multiple winged Sams soaring up and down and around his legs in majestic poses. 

He obviously didn’t want Bucky there, so Bucky wordlessly moved back to the kitchen.

Sam had finally finished his call. He looked towards Loki, who was blinking at the ceiling. Steve shifted like he was about to stand up and Bucky raised his hand to signal him back down.

“Not yet,” he said quietly. Loki had been trying his damndest to hide in plain sight and Bucky had blown his cover. 

Not to mention, leaving him alone for now would give Bucky the excuse to spend even more time away from that stare. He wondered who Loki would go for first if he went out of his mind and felt truly threatened. He’d thought for one bright and terrible moment that it would have been Steve, the night before. But even though Loki had been out of his mind with panic, Steve had only ended up with a few shallow cuts that were already healed.

Sam set his phone down on the table. “I can’t guarantee any kind of a warranty on the new devices. Not unless you want to donate some Wakandan hardware for the building materials. I didn’t mention what exactly took out the phones. Luckily, Stark didn’t ask. He said he’s having a bad arm day, so it might take a minute.”

Bucky took the gut-punch feeling quietly, even if he couldn’t quite help dropping his eyes as he nodded. 

“Buck,” Sam said, matter of fact, “Stark’s happy to help. He likes knowing as many allied superpeople are as outfitted and contactable as possible. Makes the likelihood of him being able to stay out of the game even more of a permanent circumstance.”

Bucky nodded again. Getting technology designed by Stark Industries was the most practical option for durability. Stark didn’t even need to get personally involved in the making of it himself if he didn’t want to, as his wife’s company had plenty of top tier scientists. But he still liked the challenges of tinkering, and insisted on his personal touch when it was for anyone that had been directly involved in the war against Thanos.

It still didn’t make Bucky exactly comfortable with it. His own arm felt like it was tingling in remembered sympathy.

Steve was watching Bucky with a small frown. “How’s the basement?”

Bucky shrugged, grateful for the change of subject. “Some drywall and insulation needs to be replaced. Electrical cables and pipes seem to be all intact.”

“If you want I can make a list of supplies to pick up when I head out for the phones,” Steve said. 

Bucky felt that fist inside of him loosen a little. His lips pulled up as he nodded again, but he was unable to help turning his eyes back to check on Loki and subsequently dampen his mood.

Loki had taken the smoothie, and was bracing himself up on a thin, trembling arm, head bent as he drank it down with dogged concentration. His pants had slid down a little over his hips, showing the faint marks from the lingering damage to his lower back bracketing the sharp line of his spine pressing against his skin.

Goddamn it.

“Can you look for something else?” Bucky asked, keeping his voice low. “Something...I don’t know. Everything that I have in this house would be too firm for him.”

If Loki was listening in, he didn’t give any obvious reaction. 

“Cushions would be a good idea,” Sam agreed. “Bunch of hardcore plank mattress sleepers aren’t gonna be on the same level as someone who can’t even take being on a couch. And I can always call Stark back if you don’t find anything.”

That stirred an unpleasant feeling in Bucky’s stomach, strengthened by the slew of memories that tried to rush in and take down the mental wall he’d raised to keep them back. 

But the unpleasant feeling he got when he looked towards the starving alien on his living room floor was worse.

\-----------

Loki drank his second smoothie a lot faster than the first. When he was done, he gasped desperately for the air he’d been foregoing as he drank, hunched over the floor. The arm that had taken most of his weight was beginning to wobble violently beneath him, but instead of collapsing, he started to strain to bring himself more upright.

Now Steve got up from the dining room table, all but rushing his way over, while Bucky and Sam fell into step close behind.

“Can I help?” Steve asked, and Loki flinched with a sharp “No.”

Steve frowned in discontent, but didn’t push, standing back and putting his hands into his pants’ pockets.

If Bucky’s skin was that prone to damage, he wouldn’t want anyone touching him, either. 

Loki struggled to bring himself into a fully sitting position, head bowed as Bucky and Sam took up spots next to Steve. Bucky could see his gaze tracking them. Loki’s eye visibly twitched when Sam inadvertently stood in a position where he blocked some of the light from the window.

Loki’s face was dry, now, but there was still some lingering puffiness from his crying. His hair rested around his face in viciously snarled tangles, giving Bucky the vague urge to go and brush out his own. At this point, it’d probably be better to just _cut_ Loki’s hair, especially if his scalp was going to be as tender and prone to injury as the rest of him.

His skin wasn’t grey anymore, or quite as ghostly white as it once had been. But he was still so damn pale, Bucky’s black shirt and the cast of natural light only accentuating his pallid complexion.

Loki flicked his eyes up, taking them all in more directly, before he rested his gaze on Steve. “Captain,” he greeted, his voice a little less dull than it had been the night before. 

The corner of Steve’s mouth tugged up at the acknowledgment. Bucky thought that whatever the reason was that Loki had come to his house at the specific time he had, he was damn lucky that Steve was there to help. 

“How are you feeling?” Steve asked.

“Terrible,” Loki said bluntly. He dipped his head lower, adding somewhat reluctantly, “But...improved.” 

Bucky thought ‘improved’ was still a stretch but Steve nodded, looking satisfied with that answer. “Anything you can think of that you need?”

“You are still refusing to imprison me,” Loki questioned. He sounded confused, but more than that he sounded like he thought Steve might be a little bit dumb. Or crazy.

“That wasn’t really on my mind,” Steve said, rigidly placid.

Loki exhaled slowly, nodding slowly, like he was confirming with himself that he’d heard the right answer. He turned to Bucky next, a good portion of that agreeableness falling away as his eyes narrowed in scrutiny, lingering on his metal arm.

Bucky kept his face blank. Loki still held himself a little like a cornered animal, but the wheels looked like they were turning a lot more easily in his brain. Something like a shrewd intelligence was coming back, even if it was tattered to hell from everything he’d gone through.

A tingle ran down Bucky’s back the longer Loki watched him. He thought to himself that he was going to have to double check later if Steve was sure it was just the scepter that gave Loki the ability to get into people’s heads. 

“Are you thinking we’ll need to lock you up?” Sam asked, breaking the tension of their locked eyes.

Now there was real tension to Loki’s shoulders. His voice was flat as he responded. “Would you believe me if I said no?” 

“I’m pretty sure I already told you I did,” Sam pointed out. 

Loki swallowed roughly, presenting the bearing of a beaten dog that expected another kick. “In any case, it would appear I have little ability to prevent it.”

“No one’s taking what you did last night personally,” Sam said, full of as much firm reassurance as Steve. 

Loki went quiet for a moment, seeming to consider that. “What I need,” he repeated in cautious hope, a faraway look beginning to return to his eyes. He shook his head, coming back to the present. “Rest and sustenance, which you have already so generously provided.” He darted a nervous look towards Sam. “And...light.”

Sam looked behind him at the window, realizing. He stepped to the side, freeing Loki from his shadow and clearing his view to the outside.

Some of the stiffness left Loki. The sun had climbed high enough at that point that it wasn’t coming in with full strength, but he seemed content with just being able to see the sky at all. 

Which made Bucky wonder how upset he was going to be when the sun went down. He hoped the living room bulbs and the extra lights Steve had brought in from the garage would be enough. 

“We can keep providing those things,” Steve said, voice calm and steady. 

“And keep an eye on the potential threat to your planet in the meantime.”

The frustration was back on Steve’s face, and Bucky found himself somewhat of the same mind. He knew that _he_ wasn’t one hundred percent won over, but Loki was being stubbornly concerned about a problem that just wasn’t there. And it wouldn’t be, if he didn’t become outright violent.

If he endeared himself enough to Steve beforehand, maybe not even then. 

“We’re just trying to help you,” Steve said. “It sounds like it’s working.”

Bucky gave Steve a look, nowhere near as certain about that. In his mind Loki’s returning ability to interact only served to highlight how damaged his body was. He didn’t even have the strength to stand on his own yet, and if anyone helped him, it was going to be at the expense of his own health. 

And the sight of him desperately clinging to Sam’s phone in the dark was still fresh in Bucky’s mind.

Loki let out a breath of a laugh, showing a considerable amount of teeth before the expression faded. “You know, Thor and I were actually intending on returning to Earth together. I asked him if he thought it was a good idea to bring me along.”

Steve tilted his head, curious. “And what did he say?” 

“He said ‘probably not,’” Loki said. A hint of amusement remained in his expression. “But that was not going to stop him from gleefully inflicting my presence upon you all.”

“We would have taken all the help we could get,” Steve said honestly.

That, Bucky could agree with.

“I am sorry that I was held up,” Loki said, tone dry. “I wanted to come. But, destiny…it arrived, and I...” He shuddered and hunched before he could finish, his arms pulling in tight to his body. All the nerve he’d regained - gone, just like that. His voice dwindled with it, sapped of all personality but the building panic. “I, I couldn’t...” He suddenly jolted his head up, looking towards the sky, eyes rigidly wide, like he thought he would die if he blinked. His next words came in a desperate rush. “Can you tell me of Thor?”

Steve had been frowning at Loki’s response, but now he looked decidedly more disturbed. “Loki,” he asked. “Are you having memory problems?”

“No,” Loki said. His hands were beginning to shake in his lap, fingers curling into each other. Tears were quickly forming in his eyes. “I am not. I know - you’ve told me before. Last night, and before that. I just, I need...I must hear it. Please. Let me hear it.”

Steve crouched down cautiously, trying to draw Loki’s gaze without blocking the light. Loki flinched at the proximity, thin arms cording like he was anticipating an attack. 

Bucky’s own body tensed in kind, wondering if Steve was going to insist on reaching out. He was ready to bodily pull him back if he did.

All Steve did was say, “Thor’s alive.”

New tears broke free to rush down Loki’s cheeks, dropping from the sharp line of his jaw. He hadn’t looked away from the window. “Thank you,” he said, the words shaky and heartfelt. “Thank you.”

Bucky was beginning to see a pattern, and it was a pattern he didn’t like.


End file.
